View Single Post
Old 02-17-2008, 01:44 PM  
rowan
Too lazy to set a custom title
 
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Australia
Posts: 17,393
Quote:
Originally Posted by Phil21 View Post
One huge broadcast domain is starting to (thankfully) become more and more rare in hosting setups. It's insecure (as you see), and also you're billed for layer2 broadcast traffic that is not yours (all those ARP's and other traffic you see are being billed). I've seen setups where the broadcast domain is so large, that this adds 2-3mbit/sec. Usually it's in the few kilobits/sec range though.
Good point. So far my almost completely idle server (save for a kernel source download) is showing about 5 "kb/s" of average inbound transfer - I presume this is kiloBYTES rather than kiloBITS

Quote:
Originally Posted by Phil21 View Post
The large layer2 broadcast domains are also habitually looked for, and exploited by spammers. They will buy a cheap dedicated server (or exploit a virtual account...), and run scripts which will bind IP's, send spam, then unbind them after a few minutes. It can be maddening to track these down (we have a customer who had a similar setup for far too long), not to mention the "real" people who own the IP's are losing traffic during that time frame.
Damn, this is something I was hoping I wouldn't hear. I'll take my rose coloured glasses off now and remember that the world is a bad place.

Ycaza, I'm not "outing" them because although they have a strange and relatively insecure setup (I can't recall seeing ARP requests for everything on any other host) I don't think they've done anything particularly wrong.

As a customer I'm also concerned about being a victim of the issue I've raised.
rowan is offline   Share thread on Digg Share thread on Twitter Share thread on Reddit Share thread on Facebook Reply With Quote