The Downtime. 9

If you’ve been failing to load tehCpeng.net for the past three days here’s why:

It’s been more than 72 hours of exhaustion.

Short story: My blog was down for more than 72 hours due to a massive DDoS attack on my host. It has since been resolved and hopefully won’t reoccur again. *crosses fingers*

Long story: It was Wednesday night, 3rd September when tehCpeng.net wasn’t loading anymore. I reached my host via WLM and was informed of a DDoS attack on the server at 140mbps.

So began the long and exhausting ride over the past few days of pestering my host on the status and hoping the attacks would somehow alleviate. After 48 hours, all helpless and frustrated, I posted a lengthy support ticket ranting about how slow their IM support seems to be replying and hesitating to fill me in on the details.

The support team made a rather quick and prompt reply, reassuring me of the situation and detailed the measures they’ve taken to block the attack. That calmed my frustration a little, but the attacks went on and on yesterday afternoon, 6th September, my host cited the attacks were still incoming at 500mbps. Bloody hell. By the time, tehCpeng.net has gone down for about three days.

Which totally sucked. I understand the amount of pressure my host is going through to get their network back up. But you just can’t help feeling frustrated over a helpless situation.

All sorts of measures were tried, including moving my blog to a US-based server and yet, to no avail. The DDoS attacks were too persistent.

Fast forward this morning, more than 72 hours after I last saw my blog, I found the attacks still ongoing. I checked back on a lowyat.net thread on the attacks and found that my host were updating the domain IP’s one by one to pinpoint which domain is the problem. They updated mine and ended, rather instantly, the longest ever downtime I’ve experienced.

I can only hope that this frustrating experience would be my last. It’s been a long week. =\

*exasperated sigh*

Remembering the roots. 7

In about an hour, Malaysia would turn 51.

It’s time we cherish the moment, put aside all our differences, our insufficiencies, our beliefs, and celebrate what we all have in common - being proud citizens of Malaysia.

This year, tehCpeng.net would be paying tribute to Mohamad Hamzah, an architect, who 61 years ago, designed Malaysia’s national flag. I guess nobody would be more proud to have his own design paraded all over the country 24/7 for 51 whole years.

It’s every designer’s wet dream I tell you.

Like this humongous one erected only once a year every Merdeka month atop the Sultan Iskandar Building.

To commemorate his achievement, I tried to replicate how would his sketch look like as he made a proposal for a flag design competition held in 1947. Okay - he might not have used English in his sketches, and the Jalur Gemilang isn’t known as the Jalur Gemilang until 1997.

Also, Mohamad Hamzah first designed his flag to have a five-pointed star instead of the 14-pointed one on the flags we see flying today.

So for today’s sake, let’s just assume he did all that on his sketches.

Happy 51st Birthday Malaysia!