5% of the Net is Unreachable

dasheiff writes "A BBC Story says US researchers reveal that up to 5% of the internet is completely unreachable. However the most interesting part is that they reported that many of the lost net sites flare into life briefly when being used to send spam or to launch attacks on other parts of the net."

Hijacked IP-Blocks

[twstdr00t]

Couldn't this be part of the IP-blocks that just appear and disappear mostly for sending spam?

A different theory

[ackthpt]

If 5% is unreachable then it's not part of the net. So, at all times 100% is reachable, the net is just variable in size.

I've run into sites which are up or down and often they're in a small shop and they actually power down their server (or it happens with a power/service outage) Lots of broken links on images. It would be interesting to see a statistic on how many pages which are technically non-functional still exist, i.e. with parts unable to display due to broken links, from sites gone away or pages moved but links not updated (which even M$N does from time to time)

Re:This leads to an interesting possibility

[madcoder47]

either that, or contact the ISPs that control the various routers en route to the SPAM servers, and have them block certain IPs Packets from being forwarded.

Flaky DNS service in the last few weeks

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Does this explain why www.theregister.co.uk is returning NXDOMAIN?

I've certainly noticed problems resolving various places from .au recently, and put it down to holidays being had by people who usually boot broken kit.

After they switched our cable modem over to AT&T's new network from Excite, I noticed that even though they were dynamically assigning the router 5 different DNS servers on widely disparate networks, I still couldn't resolve regular sites like slashdot [slashdot.org] or CNN [cnn.com]. Just errored out.

Did Excite do some sort of large scale public service that I'm unaware of? Were they providing really top of the line DNS service and I was just too dumb to realize it?

Doesn't this sound like a country song... "Didn't know what good DNS I had, until it was gone..."

Maybe it's time I press this old windows box into service as a public DNS server. I mean, small contributions make the world go around, right? I bet I could get redhat running in an hour or less...

This just proves, an idle mind is the devil's workshop...

Re:NXDOMAIN for theregister.co.uk

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed this last night, too, so I did some whois-es, and went to the website of their registrar, and it appears that their registration has lapsed or something. (Nasty Christmas surprise.)

I resisted the temptation to re-register the domain for them for $6.75 per annum, as it would probably cause too much trouble, and I have no idea what their DNS servers are, etc.

Re:Sites behind NAT

[category9]

I think the evolution of IPv6 will take place in new networks, for example 3G mobile nets. Over time this new networks will take over the old ones, and one by one IPv6 nets will become obselete and switched off. I'll agree that a large number of networks will convert from v4 to v6, for example academic networks, but most will just fade into the past. Perhaps one day the v4 internet will become a cult network once again ruled by the hackers that invented it.

Spammers don't hide. They use dedicated ISPs.

[1gor]

You say "spammers hide"? They don't. I am puzzled how to fight a dedicated spam-ISP like this one [web-jet.com] who offers "safe haven" for all bulk-mail senders that were kicked out from other ISPs. Can I make THEIR portion of internet unreachable?

Re:Pardon?

[phred]

Next time you spout off, maybe you might think about actually researching the subject first. This whole story is based on a paper [nanog.org] that was presented at the October NANOG conference.

You do a disservice to the memory of Abha Ahuja with your uninformed yelping. This had nothing to do with a cheap gimmick to get publicity.

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Re:Content-free article

[Allen Akin]

If you can't measure it, it's opinion not science. (No, I can't find who said it first -- it's not original with me.)

My recollection was that Lord Kelvin was the originator. A quick search with Google turned up this Kelvin quote (among others that are more entertaining :-))

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.