It seems the CPAN Testers server went catatonic at around 09:00 UTC this morning, and wasn't processing any external requests, including ssh. I checked it this morning before going to work and all seemed fine.
As a consequence of the outage, it appears that some curious packets were sent out from it to someone else's server. At the current time I don't have all the details, but the person in question seemed to imply there were 50k+ requests being sent their way. They have generated an abuse message to the hosting company, which I'm now trying to deal with. However, I would be curious to know if anyone received a bulk load of email messages from the server, or saw any other effects from a page request, other than a timeout. I suspect that this person meant SMTP traffic, as the only place that should be receiving requests from the server is the PAUSE server. I also suspect that a DoS attack caused the original problem, and I'm currently looking at ways to automatically shut processes down if anything like this happens again. Cheers, Barbie. -- Birmingham Perl Mongers <http://birmingham.pm.org> Memoirs Of A Roadie <http://barbie.missbarbell.co.uk> CPAN Testers Blog <http://blog.cpantesters.org>
