Re: Long response times from elpa.gnu.org

[Bob Proulx]

Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > Good idea but as far as I know elpa.gnu.org is not a Savannah machine.
> > Therefore the Savannah Hackers won't have any ability to do anything
> > about it.  (Speaking as one of the Savannah Hackers.
> 
> Hmmm... I'm one of the "admin"s of elpa.gnu.org, but I don't know enough
> to have any clue what I might do about a DoS, or even to really figure
> out that the machine is indeed under a DoS attack.

It is a problem.  When it comes to a DoS attack the best place to
mitigate it is as far upstream in the routers as possible.  I think if
a network DoS attack is detected then it is definitely a good thing to
notify the FSF admins so that they are aware of the problem and can
help.  But even then I don't know what the best action that can be
taken specific to the gnu.org systems.  It would need someone familiar
with the network to be able to block the attacks upstream so that the
machine load can return to normal.

> So, I hope someone managing the "hypervisor" under which elpa.gnu.org is
> running might be able to help.  Admittedly, I don't know if that's
> linked to Savannah hackers or not, or who that might be.

I can run xentop and see that elpa does appear to be one of the VMs on
the "colonialone" xen dom0 server.  Along with debbugs too.  But I
have no other access to it.  For any admin help the escalation would
be to the FSF admins.

Being on the same dom0 means that potentially those are also affected
by the same issues as have been talked about for vcs.  On the VM it
just looks like long I/O wait times causing load with no cpu usage.
But the VM runs very slowly sometimes to the point that access, such
as through web browsers, times out.

When non-DoS slowdown problems such as these are encountered please do
report them to the FSF admins so that we can get things improved.  I
think the Savannah folks would appreciate knowing about it too since
we are all in the same dom0 boat.  Personally I would appreciate a
note to savannah-hackers-public or savannah-hackers-private about it.
We can then compare notes.  (About the slowdown problem.  Not about a
DoS.  I don't think we can help about a DoS.)

Bob