DreamHost DNS issues | Hacker News Reader

DreamHost DNS issues

dreamhoststatus.com

58 pointslfischer27 comments

They're saying it's a DDOS attack. Looks like it started right around the same time as their DOJ hearing this morning.

Update: There are reports that the DDOS is in reaction to DreamHost hosting PunishedStormer, the rebranded DailyStormer site.

https://twitter.com/OpStandUpToCFAA/status/90077016627919667...

And the tail end of https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/daily-stormer-punished-storm...

They're refusing to hand over data to the FBI about visitors to a Trump-protest site, so if this is more than a co-incidence, then we're possibly looking at internet-savvy "Pro-Trump" folks. Since we know 4chan was a huge congregation point, I'd wager they're just a bunch of folks using LOIC to attack DH, or some DNS amplification attack.

Edit: Interestingly enough, this is going on even though the DOJ amended their request to be more focused (they claimed to not understand exactly what they were requesting, which is just as scary). So, DH will probably comply now, but the attack rages on. http://fortune.com/2017/08/23/doj-dreamhost-anti-trump/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-dreamhost-idUSK...

The warrant has been approved.

Thanks for the update. That's probably worthy of a top-level thread of its own!

Wierd. They'd supposedly dropped the request yesterday. http://gizmodo.com/justice-department-drops-request-for-ip-a...

They dropped the request for the IP addresses, but actually broadened what they were looking for. National Law Journal had one of the better articles on this at

http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202796292903/DreamHost...

The title to that article is misleading. They didn't drop the request, they changed it to limit the scope. If you read the changes, they are no longer requests HTTP request and response logs, but rather published content on the site and any transactions.

... we're possibly looking at internet-savvy "Pro-Trump" folks

After all, they are free people like artists. If artists get up in the morning feeling good, all they do all day is paint. The same goes for internet-savvy Pro-Trump folks.

It seems like it might be internet-savvy anti-DailyStormer types. https://twitter.com/OpStandUpToCFAA/status/90077016627919667...

(I updated the main post with this and another link.)

Where did they say there? Their twitter[1] doesn't mention DDOS at the moment.

EDIT: I didn't realize they have 3 twitter accounts. Their status account has a tweet about this[2].

[1] https://twitter.com/DreamHost

[2] https://twitter.com/dhstatus/status/900761746767364098

They have a bot account at https://twitter.com/dhstatus

> I am but a robot. My purpose is to syndicate the contents of http://dreamhoststatus.com . I can feel neither love, nor pain. Tweet @dreamhostcare for support!

Just have to say, dreamhost has had great uptime for such a cheap package, given the amount of features they provide.

Given this is not at all a result of their own error, I think they're doing a great job with reliability. By comparison (and it's not much of a comparison) godaddy shared hosting goes down WEEKLY for spans of 5-10 minutes, and it's more expensive and has way fewer features.

Well this finally gave me the bump to move my DNS away from Dreamhost, which I have been meaning to do for literally years, now to sit and wait for the new name servers to propagate.

Why? A ddos could be launched against any provider. I dont see this as a dh specific issue to move over.

What you should do is have two separate DNS providers.

Larger DNS providers are harder to DDoS and also tend to have more DDoS mitigation in place. This is not to say that it can never happen, but it's substantially less likely.

I dont think DH is really all that small. Comlared to aws and stuff maybe but I think they have pretty significant infrastructure.

What Dns providers are you thinking of? My guess would be something like cloudflare would be a good choice. Though Ive never looked into it tbh, I run my own dns.

I use AWS for most of my DNS. Also thinking of UltraDNS and Cloudflare. These are all massively larger than Dreamhost.

Yup. All my clients' sites are down. I wonder what the internet-wide impact is. And I wonder if I can migrate DNS providers while it is down.

As long as you have the DNS data, yeah, you should be able to do so, unless DH is also your domain registrar.

Does their domain control panel not allow you to set custom nameservers?

edit: oh, that is probably also under DDoS, whoops

Your edit is right panel.dreamhost.com doesnt resolve. But when it loads it does have the ability to specify nameservers.

I can highly recommend keeping your DNS stuff separate from hosting. For 'critical' stuff I've been quite happy to use DNSimple for that, and regular mom-and-pop LAMP hosting for the actual site.

In some cases I pipe it through Digital Ocean, because it's nice to have everything in one place, but I've wondered if that might have some performance impact. Can anyone confirm/deny this? So, domain registrar -> Digital Ocean -> hosting.

Unless your domain itself is there with it's root records set on their dns... often called "glue" records.

If your registrar shows "DreamHost, LLC" this would be the case.

If you agree with what they are doing (fighting the FBI demand), there is a donation page for the cause; https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/dreamhost/

All my DH sites are up.

TIL people actually use Dreamhost for important stuff.

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