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The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

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Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#31

Post by tete »

verroq wrote: post #23

Why can't people find where their servers? I understand they have their own IP allocation, thus they can use BGP tricks. But don't they need a sympathetic ISP or similar to help them get the routes in?

I guess if ISPs would really go sniffing on whether they host them they would probably be able to find out (probably!). But then when you have couple of hundred VPS customer and give a tiny bit about their privacy then as long as you get paid and receive no complaints why would you really go look for them?

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#32

Post by fooyc »

tacotime wrote: post #26
droopyEyelids wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think TPB specifically might save money: 1) Hardware seizure expenses vs LEOs duplicating the hdd of a virt. 2) TPB needs to locate in disparate jurisdictions to take advantages of different legal situations. That would involve a ton of shipping costs, probably more lost hardware, and paying for remote hands 3) They had been paying a premium for 'bulletproof' hosting.

For real, their dedicated hosting costs are most likely not going to be at all comparable to the ones most people commonly get quoted. Hosting costs go up when your host runs out of a former Cold War bunker. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker

You need CyberBunker if you need your host to protect you.

If you have 20 servers in 20 different providers, who don't know who they are hosting, you don't need this.

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#33

Post by nkcmr »

verroq wrote: post #23

Why can't people find where their servers? I understand they have their own IP allocation, thus they can use BGP tricks. But don't they need a sympathetic ISP or similar to help them get the routes in?

IIRC They have their load balancer hosted under a sovereign IP address (the IP block belongs to a political party). So attempting to mess with it could constitute infringement of free speech.

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#34

Post by bowlofpetunias »

allegory wrote: post #4
crazy1van wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may "have no clue" but it seems like that's only because they don't care and haven't looked. I don't see anything in the article that would prevent the providers from figuring this out unless I'm missing something.

If someone is paying the bill, do they really care?

It's not about the money, it's about not being able to care and survive as a business.

Because then they would also have to care about the thousands of other VM's that may run all kinds of stuff that is illegal somewhere, questionable, politically, socially, culturally or commercially sensitive etcetera.

No ISP can afford to be proactive about this. They cannot afford to care. Or even know.

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#35

Post by Theodores »

> In total the VMs use 182 GB of RAM and 94 CPU cores. The total storage capacity is 620 GB, but that’s not all used.

That level of hardware/cores seems a bit over the top given what TPB does.

When I was a boy we had this thing called 'Alta Vista'. It was the search engine before Bing! came along. Processors did not run at gigahertz speeds back then and a large disk was 2Gb. Nonetheless most offices had the internet and when people went searching 'Alta Vista' was the first port of call for many.

TPB has an index of a selective part of the internets, i.e. movies, software, music, that sort of thing. Meanwhile, back in the 1990's, AltaVista indexed everything, as in the entire known internets, with everything stored away in less than the 620Gb used by TPB for their collection of 'stolen' material.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

Alta Vista is a very large project, requiring the cooperation of at least 5 servers, configured for searching huge indices and handling a huge Internet traffic load. The initial hardware configuration for Alta Vista is as follows:

Alta Vista -- AlphaStation 250 4/266 4 GB disk 196 MB memory Primary web server for gotcha.com Queries directed to WebIndexer or NewsIndexer

NewsServer -- AlphaStation 400 4/233 24 GB of RAID disks 160 MB memory News spool from which news index is generated Serves articles (via http) to those without news server

NewsIndexer -- AlphaStation 250 4/266 13 GB disk 196 MB memory Builds news index using articles from NewsServer Answers news index queries from Alta Vista

Spider -- DEC 3000 Model 900 (replacement for Model 500) 30 GB of RAID disk 1GB memory Collects pages from the web for WebIndexer

WebIndexer -- Alpha Server 8400 5/300 210 GB RAID disk (expandable) 4 GB memory (expandable) 4 processors (expandable) Builds the web index using pages sent by Spider. Answers web index queries from Alta Vista

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#36

Post by lmm »

Theodores wrote: post #35

> In total the VMs use 182 GB of RAM and 94 CPU cores. The total storage capacity is 620 GB, but that’s not all used. That level of hardware/cores seems a bit over the top given what TPB does. When I was a boy we had this thing called 'Alta Vista'. It was the search engine before Bing! came along. Processors did not run at gigahertz speeds back then and a large disk was 2Gb. Nonetheless most offices had the internet…

How many pages were there on "the entire internet" back then? How many reqs/second did AltaVista serve? How does that compare to the numbers for TPB?

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#37

Post by dlgeek »

tacotime wrote: post #27
waxjar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading their load-balancer shuts itself off after 2 minutes if something strange happens. The whole thing is run from memory, so no traces will be left. I don't know how accurate this is, though.

I wonder how long until our nation's SWAT teams are equipped with ram rippers and cans of liquid nitrogen.

No need to get that fancy. If they're in the cloud, they're most likely on Xen, which natively supports full memory dumps. LE goes to the cloud provider with a warrant, they run "sudo xm dump-core", LE walks away with a memory dump without the client ever knowing anything.

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#38

Post by clarry »

fooyc wrote: post #29
droopyEyelids wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think TPB specifically might save money: 1) Hardware seizure expenses vs LEOs duplicating the hdd of a virt. 2) TPB needs to locate in disparate jurisdictions to take advantages of different legal situations. That would involve a ton of shipping costs, probably more lost hardware, and paying for remote hands 3) They had been paying a premium for 'bulletproof' hosting.

Renting a dedicated server doesn't involve any of this. There are dedicated server providers in every part of the world, including MPAA-proof countries.

What's the MPAA proof country? The US has a lot of influence, and they've very obviously pressured other countries into action against TPB.

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#39

Post by dlgeek »

TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #14
icedchai wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they use a VPN provider? It's trivial to set up your own if you control the systems at both ends.

Assuming at least one side isn't under a NAT, true. Otherwise it gets... "fun".

Why would you be under a NAT? A public IP and a networking allotment is one of the core offerings of almost every cloud provider out there.

Re: The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

#40

Post by Nanzikambe »

icedchai wrote: post #12
Nanzikambe wrote: post #11

Interesting, so I'm presuming there's several VPNs involved between the load-balancer and all the discrete servers. I wonder if they use a VPN provider with a static IP and no-logs policy or if it's simply yet another VPS. I'd love to hear a little more about the architecture.

Why would they use a VPN provider? It's trivial to set up your own if you control the systems at both ends.

To make the legal side effects "Somebody Else's Problem"? seeing as that's the service many VPN providers offer. Might save them having to get new load balancer VPS quite so often, making it that much harder and more time consuming to knock offline.

I don't know, that's why I'm asking though.

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