[Marxism] NOTICE: MIA under attack. SAVE-OUR-SITE!

[dwalters@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

Save Our Site!

The MIA is in dire straits.

In early November we came under sustained denial of service attack from Internet
hosts in China attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in our server's
operating system. While we have no firm proof, the nature of the attack, our
previous history with the PRC, and the experience of others suggest that this
maybe politically motivated and directed by the Chinese government. Protecting
ourselves necessitated rebuilding part of it (the kernel) and rebooting the
system remotely. The failure of the system to properly boot into the new kernel
caused a prolonged outage as we scrambled to find someone with the necessary
access to get the system back into the previous configuration.

While the attacks continued and greatly degraded MIA performance, we were
understandably cautious about rebuilding the kernel and trying again. On
January 15, the server became unresponsive and we asked for it to be remotely
rebooted, taking the opportunity to bring it up with the new kernel.

While this alleviated the previous issue, it seems to have uncovered another,
more serious, problem with our CPU that causes random errors (machine check
exceptions) and cause the system to reboot.

Each time the system reboots, it causes our RAID storage system to reinitialize
and rebuild, a lengthy process that severely degrades performance. To make
matters worse, the redundant disk in the array seems to be failing.

As if that weren't bad enough, while attempting to make arrangements to site a
new server, we learned that our colocation facility will be closing on February
1, leaving the MIA literally homeless.

At the moment, our redundant disk is back online and we are rebuilding the array
to protect against data loss on the server. We also have offsite backups of all
MIA content should the worst come to pass. We are furiously searching for new
hosting space, but our data transfer needs (approximately 1.3TB a month) make
this a very difficult choice compared with our previous non-profit host.

The bottom line: there is a significant probability that we will not be able to
find and deploy an acceptable solution in time to meet the February 1
lights-out date. This means that the MIA will be off the air. We will make
every attempt to bridge the gap with the help of our dedicated mirror operators
though we may need to stop serving some of our more "expensive" content such as
MP3s and PDFs. There is also a chance that our ultimate solution may require us
to make a long-term evaluation of the type of content we serve and make things
like PDFs available via alternate distribution channels (e.g. BitTorrent).
However, despite our recent litany of seemingly fatal problems, the MIA remains
a strong organization with a wealth of content, committed to providing the
premiere electronic library of Marxist writings. Despite the political,
technical, or economic pressures, we're not about to say die.


--MIA


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