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Nice going Mac OS X hints...
Authored by: acalado on Sep 22, '03 09:10:20PM

I just tried going to the Terascale Cluster web page to view the pics and got this message:

"Terascale Image Access Restricted
Our servers are not able to keep up with the tremendous interest in images of the Terascale Cluster project. For now, we are restricting access to the images to those who connect to the network with a Virginia Tech IP address. We are working on adding additional servers with smaller images in the near future. Please try again after September 24, 2003."

You have unintentionally promoted a denial of service attack by suggesting that people try and download all the images at the same time from the Virginia Tech web site. So many people tried your hint that their servers got overloaded and they were forced to remove public access to the pictures. Way to go and ruin other people's fun...

May I suggest that you consider the repercussions of posting these types of hints. You have a very large readership now and need to consider the potential negative impact your posted hints might have on third party web sites that are mentioned in the hint. I think in this case, people were more interested in the G5 supercomputer cluster project than the shareware you were helping promote...



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Nice going Mac OS X hints...
Authored by: force_quit on Sep 22, '03 10:52:39PM
Slashdot probably had a little more impact...

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Previously trashed...
Authored by: robg on Sep 23, '03 12:04:12AM
The Terracluster image site was Slashdotted all weekend; I wasn't able to see any images until the mirror (http://tartarus.uwa.edu.au/~trs80/Terascale/) was posted. That mirror is, as far as I can tell, still up and working fine.

The link to the main G5 Cluster site from macosxhints won't cause any bandwidth issues for them (it's mainly a text page), especially not compared to what they got from Slashdot on Saturday. The big problem was their image pages; they put up full-size images, and used thumbnails which were simply scaled down via HTML -- so loading a page of 10 preview thumbnails required loading 10 260KB+ image files -- ouch!

In terms of future use of URLs, there's only so much a site can do -- if something is hintworthy and posted to a public server, I'll do my best to check with the site owners if I have time -- but it's not always easy to do, as many times emails to 'webmaster@some_domain.com' go unanswered. Besides, we don't get that much traffic! :)

-rob.

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Previously trashed...
Authored by: acalado on Sep 23, '03 01:56:13AM

Well, Slashdot may have mentioned the site, but it didn't encourage people to suck down the entire library of images all at once now did it? ;-)

I think there is a big difference in bandwidth usage if you are browsing the images one at a time through their web page vs. downloading all 150 in a row. That can add up real quick, especially because judging from the pics they had, most people just browsing them would probably get bored after 10 or 20 pics. the entire library has dozens of hi res images.

I didn't mean to say that you shouldn't post a link to web sites, but if that link is used as an example for a hint (where it doesn't matter what site you use as an example as was the case this time) then you may want to edit out the link and replace it with some generic non-existant site like www.some-web-address.com.

Just my 2ยข worth...



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Previously trashed...
Authored by: Judge Youngwood on Sep 23, '03 02:09:03PM
Actually, the magnitude of the Slashdot Effect is well documented. Mere mention of a site on Slashdot is often enough to overload the server.

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Think b4 p0st...
Authored by: dave1212 on Sep 23, '03 12:07:59AM

That message, which btw I found no sign of while just browsing their G5 image gallery, has nothing to do with the visitors coming from this site compared to the number from Slashdot. (Sorry, Rob) ;)

If you must post like this, please do it in the forums.


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http://www.68kmla.ca/



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Think b4 p0st...
Authored by: acalado on Sep 23, '03 02:03:05AM

The problem isn't the number of visitors, it is the amount of data they are requesting. The Slashdot article merely mentions the site exists whereas Max OS X Hints used the web site address as an example which had lots of people trying it just for the sake of trying the command out to see if it works.

Most slashdot readers simply visited the site and browsed the pictures one at a time. Most visitors from this site were probably copying and pasting the Terminal command that was given as an example which had the effect of downloading ALL the images in a short span of time.

In any case, even if this site was not responsible for the site being taken down, my point is still valid. I have a web site with pictures on it and I could just imagine what would have happened to my site if MY web site address was selected for the example. I wouldn't be too pleased.



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Mirror...
Authored by: robg on Sep 23, '03 07:52:52AM
Please read the original hint carefully and check the links and the wget example -- I did not do a wget on the original Virginia Tech site. I did a wget on the full mirror, where the top of the page reads:
This is a mirror of the pictures of the Terascale cluster which is made up of 1,100 PowerMac G5s. The original site was firewalled, apparently due to the Slashdot effect. Bring it on!
Note: The emphasis on "Bring it on!" was not added by me; it's there (still there today) on the original page. Based on that comment, I felt fine posting a wget to the mirror (and it's not like sucking down a site is a big secret -- as others have pointed out, there are quite a few GUI tools that do it more easily than wget or curl).

The only link in the hint that goes to Virigina Tech goes to their main information page, and I hope you're not advocating that I don't post those any more...

-rob.

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