[CLOSED] BTC Guild - Pays TxFees+NMC, Stratum, VarDiff, Private Servers

[cableiso]

well I got 4 fail overs now. have you been able to figure out where this is coming from?

Who stands to gain from this disruption?

Follow the money?

Yea. Looks like a classic block grab.

What i'm about to say is probably wrong, but that has never stopped me.

The size of Pie is more or less fixed. if you lower someone elses hashrate, you potentially increase your own share of the pie. Even if this isn't true, it is quite possible that those behind the attacks think it is. Also, with the difficulty set for a higher hashrate, lowering the hashrate would cause fewer coins to be mined which could potentially cause a rise in the exchange rate.

I agree, for the same reason you stated earlier.  If you're working on a block and it's solved by another miner, the value of your work is 0.  I understand that "it all averages out", but it seems clear to me that taking out the competition certainly raises one's odds.  Extrapolate this to the extreme of no competitors.  Well hell, a single CPU miner on a 486dx would become a millionaire with no competition.  (If they had a turbo switch on that bad boy, of course)

It's not quite clear who benefited most from the ddos, but it's a good check to see whose hashrate didn't fall proportionally during the attacks.

[jojo69]

ugh, still fubar here

[xstr8guy]

HA!  I just solved another block!  That's 2 in the past 7 days.  Not bad for a guy hashing at a measly 170Gh/s.  

[eleuthria]

HA!  I just solved another block!  That's 2 in the past 7 days.  Not bad for a guy hashing at a measly 170Gh/s.   

And this is the universe we're living in, where 170 GH/s is referred to as "measly".  When BTC Guild started that was nearly the entire network.

[demonmaestro]

eleuthria: How is things looking? I had notice the eu server is down.

[eleuthria]

eleuthria: How is things looking? I had notice the eu server is down.

The servers in EU are still completely down (by IP).  The DNS for EU-Stratum is pointed to a US proxy currently, and it's working.  There's some extra filtering happening at the moment that may be impacting larger mining farms trying to access the pools via stratum/eu-stratum.btcguild.com where there are multiple stratum proxies or multiple machines connecting individually.

[Trongersoll]

eleuthria: How is things looking? I had notice the eu server is down.

The servers in EU are still completely down (by IP).  The DNS for EU-Stratum is pointed to a US proxy currently, and it's working.  There's some extra filtering happening at the moment that may be impacting larger mining farms trying to access the pools via stratum/eu-stratum.btcguild.com where there are multiple stratum proxies or multiple machines connecting individually.

Eleuthria, what are your thoughts as to who might be attacking you and why? It seems to me that one would need pretty extensive resources to put on an attack like this. I'd think that your run of the mill Botnet jockey would have better things to do than annoy the largest bitcoin pool. What might their motive be?

[demonmaestro]

to take BTCGuild from the "40+" network ownage down to 20.   per all they see is the blockchain.info stuff

[Trongersoll]

to take BTCGuild from the "40+" network ownage down to 20.   per all they see is the blockchain.info stuff

I just can't see anyone doing this, harnessing this much computing power, just "for the good of the BTC network". It seems to me there would have to be another reason.

[Zammo]

The attacks weren't only targeted at BTCGuild, 50BTC also got hit at the same time

[neutralist]

he hei. We are... news cooming... 50btc btcguild and more...

 What do you mean by this ?

who knows
guy is russian speaker from Volgograd
not much else is known

KGB trying to take over the network......??

[Fassade]

Since yesterday I can not log on to the page, I tried again today and it says my IP has been banned ..

[rammy2k2]

is this under ddos again ?

[eleuthria]

is this under ddos again ?

Yes, it's under attack.  Most users are able to connect and mine again, but there are some limitations being put on the proxy servers which prohibit some miners that run many machines/cgminer instances if trying to connect via the traditional stratum. or eu-stratum. DNS entries.

[Tigggger]

Someone mentioned this earlier during the main attack but is probably got swamped, is it not possible to whitelist active miners and block everything else during an attack ?

[eleuthria]

Someone mentioned this earlier during the main attack but is probably got swamped, is it not possible to whitelist active miners and block everything else during an attack ?

Whitelisting does not work.  iptables does not work.  Once an attacker is already flooding your pipes, blocking them does not magically remove their traffic that is already hitting your switch.  Upstream filtering IS in place at BTC Guild, but this is hitting through Stratum ports.  There simply isn't any way to completely block the traffic, outside of having enough bandwidth to absorb it.  Then the problem becomes identifying good vs bad traffic.  BTC Guild regularly has 25,000-30,000 active stratum connections.  It's *extremely* hard to separate the good from the bad.

[Tigggger]

Someone mentioned this earlier during the main attack but is probably got swamped, is it not possible to whitelist active miners and block everything else during an attack ?

Whitelisting does not work.  iptables does not work.  Once an attacker is already flooding your pipes, blocking them does not magically remove their traffic that is already hitting your switch.  Upstream filtering IS in place at BTC Guild, but this is hitting through Stratum ports.  There simply isn't any way to completely block the traffic, outside of having enough bandwidth to absorb it.  Then the problem becomes identifying good vs bad traffic.  BTC Guild regularly has 25,000-30,000 active stratum connections.  It's *extremely* hard to separate the good from the bad.

OK, thanks for the explanation, not familiar with how it all works. Appreciate all you do to provide such a good service.

[centove]

Someone mentioned this earlier during the main attack but is probably got swamped, is it not possible to whitelist active miners and block everything else during an attack ?

Whitelisting does not work.  iptables does not work.  Once an attacker is already flooding your pipes, blocking them does not magically remove their traffic that is already hitting your switch.  Upstream filtering IS in place at BTC Guild, but this is hitting through Stratum ports.  There simply isn't any way to completely block the traffic, outside of having enough bandwidth to absorb it.  Then the problem becomes identifying good vs bad traffic.  BTC Guild regularly has 25,000-30,000 active stratum connections.  It's *extremely* hard to separate the good from the bad.

Welcome to the nextgen DDoS.. It's a thorny problem.

[PeZ]

Anyone else have their USB Block Erupters die during the DDOSing? My two devices have their green lights constantly on now.

[EDIT]

Got it working on another computer.

[eleuthria]

EU-Stratum is now attempting to come back online in the EU region rather than a redirect to a US-based proxy.