Access

My glasses and pen on my notes

So while my daughter takes her driver's ed in the building that I work in, I just stay upstairs in my office for an extra three hours until she is done. I may run out to get a bite to eat or let the dog out, but I am pretty content to sit quietly in my office and document, document, document.

There are some individuals in this world who have nothing better to do but to think of ways to muck things up. They devise these little programs (worms) that will bring an entire network to it's knees. It isn't a virus. A lot of end users just clump anything that corrupts a computer or a network as a virus.

One version is a DoS. Denial of Service attack. If this little program gets the IP address of a server in a network, it can really cause some havoc. When a machine sends a request to a server, the server MUST answer. That is it's job. Like a doorman. Somebody knocks on the door and the doorman answers. The little devil knocker has run and is hiding behind a bush. The doorman stands with the door open for a few seconds, looking from left to right, then shrugs and closes the door. Before the doorman can turn around to go back to his "other" work, there is another knock on the door. The doorman answers the door. Again, nobody is there. The doorman looks around again and then closes the door.

Now, multiply that to a billion or so and you get the idea that the server is now "unable to serve". A Denial of Service attack has been performed on the network and legitimate end users do not get their door knock answered because the doorman is too busy attempting to serve the knocker who keeps running away and hiding behind the bush. Unlike a human brain, the server cannot "learn" to ignore the knock, but must try to respond each and every time. Sick, I tell you. Just sick.

In business, this can be nipped in the bud pretty quickly. When business is not getting done, you can bet that some money is going to be spent to resolve this problem as quickly as possible. But, in a school, the problem may go on for weeks.

A teacher instructs the lab to go to a science page. They type in the url and click. The browser just sits and spins. Going nowhere. The resources of the network are depleted because deep inside the network the attack is at full throttle. The kids begin to snicker. One throws a balled up piece of paper at their friend. The teacher is side tracked by another student. Meanwhile, the browsers for this class go nowhere. The teacher sighs and tells the class that she (or he) must go and find the technology person to see what is going on and they leave the classroom.

A bored students recalls the funny video he saw on youtube the night before. He tells a friend and they decide to see if the browser will get them out to youtube. If not, Google will show them a hundred other sites that may have that very funny video. It could be on somebody's blog. The filter has a tough time stopping this type of errant behavior. A pause in the network attack allows the student to begin the video. They laugh and a couple of other students try and see if their machine will pull up the video. Pretty soon the school has a dozen or so machines attempting to play the very funny dirtbike video. Meanwhile the attack begins again, this time from another machine.

I had a strange thought pop into my head today. I do get a lot of "sappy" e-mails. You know they type. "You are such a true friend, here is a bouquet of flowers just for you..." on and on. I rarely (if ever) forward these. I do a lot of reading about how the Internet works behind the scenes and I understand how bogged down a network can get. As I painfully wrote above. It occurred to me that someday the Internet could get so bogged down with useless junk (it may already be there) that nobody is going to move. It will be like this precious commodity. I can hear end users crying "If only we knew we were wasting the precious databases of the world by plugging up the networks with all that garbage!"

Yeah, I need to get outside and walk more.