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Comment by kami8845 | Hacker News Reader

I love these highly technical blog posts on recent events by cloudflare.

Keep up the good work guys.

[1] http://blog.cloudflare.com/why-google-went-offline-today-and...

I swear I just thought the same thing to myself.. Very concisely written, but it's written both interesting and well. Not to mention it's always welcome to see large companies like this share vital information with the public [+1 internet points for CloudFlare] :)

I wonder if it would be possible to hack into these "wall" routers from inside the country (or I suppose outside), but something tells me probably not (I doubt they would even be ping-able, but maybe through other attack vectors [like other internal computers]...). Seriously, I can't imagine how enraged I would be if someone decided to simply block the Internet.

Since BGP is sent over TCP, the routers are definitely pingable. You know how when you run traceroute you see a bunch of IPs between you and your destination? Routers like these are those hops.

Ah, sorry, I meant now, in the current state. I wonder if they just shut them down (the routers), or blocked all incoming connections from the outside...

Probably the simplest thing to do would be to just shut off the ports leading to external networks at the physical layer using management commands. They'd not be pingable from the outside, naturally, and it'd look like a cable cut (until you start doing TDR on the cable anyway), but they could bring it back online quickly once the powers that be choose to do so.

Most providers setup bgp sessions over loopback addresses only reachable from the remote router.. So no, being tcp doesn't imply the should respond to ping.

I came here to post just this. IMO it's one of the best tech blogs on the net right now.

It also seems like it would be a really cool place to work.

Thanks for the kudos. This was a really interesting story to follow and write. We've got monitors setup so we'll see the instant Syrian traffic begins flowing again.

And, if you're interested, we definitely are hiring:

https://www.cloudflare.com/join-our-team

I was just checking if Renesys[1] had any analytical updates, but hey, kudos to Cloudflare for a well-written and visualised post!

[1] http://www.renesys.com/blog/2012/11/syria-off-the-air.shtml

I love it too. I always enjoy reading about post-failure posts from GitHub about their own infrastructure. CloudFlare pushes it to another level in these posts.

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