BGFL is down!

[free780]

Depends if your PC/local DNS server cached the a record. Before port 53 got blocked.

[MrPstv]

Info from Link2ict

 

Following investigation it would appear that the intermittent internet issue is not isolated to Birmingham but is being experienced nationally by all JaNet (JISC) network users. We understand the JaNet network is currently under a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack (DDOS). We will provide further updates as information becomes available.

[HPlum78]

https://netsight.ja.net/Public/NetworkSummary.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

[MrPstv]

https://netsight.ja.net/Public/NetworkSummary.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

 

Love the link, unreachable

[Zoom7000]

Problems affecting several schools in the LGfL too. Most websites are working, but some are on/off intermittently.

[CHR1S]

What I cant get is why all internet traffic is routed via JANet, my VOIP phones are unaffected as is my un-firewalled Google services.

 

Until today I had never heard of JANet and L2ICT/BGFL mentioned in the same sentence. Ignorance was bliss, what exactly is JANet and its role for schools and why should our web stuff need to go via it?

[SovietRussia]

What I cant get is why all internet traffic is routed via JANet, my VOIP phones are unaffected as is my un-firewalled Google services.

 

Until today I had never heard of JANet and L2ICT/BGFL mentioned in the same sentence. Ignorance was bliss, what exactly is JANet and its role for schools and why should our web stuff need to go via it?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET

 

From reading that I assume for collaboration purposes, they also control all .ac.uk and .gov.uk domains

[HPlum78]

Its the research and educational network in short and yeah the old MANS (now gone and merged into JA) and local grids that schools use are connected to it.

[CHR1S]

So there is "theoretically" a single point of failure for almost every educational establishment in the country?

[MkII]

Seems to be back up

[Asgard]

yep the Janet @jiscmi is showing;

 

"

#TT169600 - Still ongoing. It is affecting most services. Due to the nature of the outage we cannot give a ETA on restoration.

"

[HPlum78]

Yeah if you look at it like that but no different to being connected to any other ISP educational or not. Edited December 8, 2015 by HPlum78

[Trojan]

Perfect storm here. My core switch has died. The VMware environment has taken a dive and the bgfl is down !

[pete]

Just a note that we're seeing flaky Internet in Lincolnshire too - mostly gateway timeouts and problems accessing sites hosted outside the UK.

[Chuckster]

I've reached the limit as to how many articles I can view this week; however, The Telegraph have a piece about the downtime: Universities across the country lose internet connections following cyber attack - Telegraph

[AMLinington]

Not sure if it's relevant but JANet has been subject to sustained and repeated DDoS attacks in the last few days - it's playing havoc with edu networks.

[HPlum78]

Attacks are also spreading to GÉANT now. So not just the UK!

[Michael]

So there is "theoretically" a single point of failure for almost every educational establishment in the country?

 

Yes and no - consider JANET a sort of Educational ISP. It's not really that different if someone targeted one of the major ISPs in a similar manner. All traffic still travels through the core of the ISP.

 

I guess the only advantage to not using JANET is that if schools were all broken up and using different ISPs, only a fraction would have been taken down and not a high percentage.

[Wave9_Lee]

No money back from JANET.

[Wave9_Lee]

When we were involved in the design of some of the large regional networks, we always proposed a dual internet service, one from JANET, one from a commercial provider. This clearly increased costs, which provided a level of resilience, but also some commercial terms around the service - i.e. commercial providers/ISP are willing to provide an SLA with service commitments and Credits when service falls below certain thresholds. JANET wouldn't provide an SLA for their free service (it's free, why would they).

 

Obviously getting some money back, doesn't really help when you have no Internet, but it does create the right behaviours in service design and fix times. I'm sure that every effort is being made to resolve these issues, but it does highlight the benefit of supplier diversity for mission critical services.

[MrPstv]

Attack floods Internet root servers with 5 million queries a second | Ars Technica UK

[network41]

Anybody having problems with JANET today ?

[Michael]

Everything seems to be behaving normally today.

[network41]

Thanks

 

Just me then Mmm

[Michael]

Thanks

 

Just me then Mmm

 

What kind of problems are you seeing?