[Bloat] netperf server news

[Rich Brown]

To the Bloat list,

I had some time, so I looked into what it might take to keep the netperf.bufferbloat.net server on-line in the face of an unwitting "DDoS" attack - automated scripts that run tests every 5 minutes 24x7. The problem was that these tests would blow through my 4TB/month bandwidth allocation in a few days.

In the past, I had been irregularly running a set of scripts to count incoming netperf connections and blacklist (in iptables) those whose counts were too high. This wasn't good enough: it wasn't keeping up with the tidal wave of connections.

Last week, I revised those scripts to work as a cron job. The current parameters are: run the script every hour; process the last two days' of kern.log files; look for > 500 connections; drop those addresses in iptables.

There are currently 479 addresses blacklisted in iptables (that explains why the bandwidth was being consumed so quickly). There are only a few new addresses being added per day, so it seems that we have flushed out most of the abusers.

My questions for this august group:

1) The server at netperf.bufferbloat.net is up and running. I get full rate speed from my 7mbps DSL circuit, but that's not much of a test. I would be interested to hear your results.

2) The current threshold comes from this estimate: most speed tests use 10 connections: 5 connections up and 5 down. So 500 connections would permit about 50 tests over the course of two days. Is that enough for "real research"? (If you need more, I can add your address to my whitelist file...)

3) I would be pleased to get comments on the set of scripts. I'm a newbie at iptables, so it wouldn't hurt to have someone else check the rules I devised. See the README at https://github.com/richb-hanover/netperfclean

Thanks.

Rich