[plug] ADSL problems

[Craig Ringer]

> Thing is, DDOS attacks have the capability to swamp *any* mail setup. iiNet
> have multiple servers - perhaps if they had 100 they'd be able to block the
> source address before they all got drowned, but with DDOS as opposed to DOS,
> even that's unlikely. And they don't have 100 mail servers :-)

Nah, they have well less than 10. (6?). Perhaps there is nothing they 
can do but wait for the server to flush its queues afterwards. Doesn't 
change the fact that their servers aren't really useable, though it may 
in fairness be simply because they're a "big, juicy target" for 
undiciplined little turds.

That said, before I switched to self-hosted mail I got "We had a DoS 
attack, which has been blocked, but the servers will take 24 to 36 hours 
to recover" too often from their support folk. S'pose it must be hard to 
impossible to automatically delete (eg using perl + mailq) randomly 
generated mail from many essentially random addrs, but a normal DoS 
shouldn't really do much. Then again, p'haps their support folk never 
thought the distributed nature of the attack was something they really 
needed to tell the customer (and fair enough, really)