Sunday, January 20, 2008

Sprint Broadband Saves Bacon Again

Last night I was working quickly trying to stop some asshole that I found attacking my site and was just about finished with the task when suddenly BLAMMO! my SSH session terminated.

My first thought was I had just done something bad and whacked the server.

In a bit of a panic I try to pull up the site in the Firefox, nothing, dead.

Is my internet connection down?

Nope, I can get to other web sites and my other servers in different data centers just fine.

Must be Comcast having a routing problem so I quickly confirm that there's a routing issue with a traceroute and breath a sigh of relief when I can access that server via my other server.

However, this doesn't solve the problem of the asshole that was waging war on my server still abusing the damn thing. The attacker was using a huge proxy list that was more current than mine plus some other things so it wasn't as simple as just blocking a single IP address or anything like that.

So I grabbed the Sprint Broadband USB stick, plugged it in, and a minute later was back on the server via a different network connection and finished blocking the attacker.

A few hours later Comcast was functioning properly again, but thanks to Sprint Broadband I no longer feel like I'm being held hostage when Comcast's service has problems.

Having the Sprint Broadband backup is definitely not a cheap solution but it's saved my ass a few times and now I no longer need to chase Wifi hotspots when I'm on the road. If you can afford the extra $60/month for internet connection redundancy I highly recommend getting a Sprint Broadband card or an equivalent from other providers. I'll think I'll stick with Sprint until something better and faster comes along in my area!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey bill I have been doing some amazing work from my ATT Tilt smart phone these days, via their 3G data network. With MS "remote display" I even work with the laptop as console I haven't got my VPN passthru working flawlessly yet, but when I do I imagine I'm pretty much remote console from anywhere on the 3G network.