Jamie McClelland: Monitoring Deflect
May First/People Link has several members that are targets of politically motivated denial of service attacks (mostly groups that support reproductive justice for women and palestinian rights). To fight off the attacks, we work closely with Deflect - a non-governmental organization based in Canada that fights against this kind of censorship.
When a site is down, it's not always easy to understand why. Deflect runs as many as 5 edge servers, any of them could be down. And, of course, the origin server could also be down.
I tried using a commericial/free as in beer service for monitoring up time, but when it reported the site being down, I had no idea which part was down.
So...
httping to the rescue. Unfortunately, it depends on --divert-connect which is only available in Debian Stretch. I run the script via a cron job and output the results to a log file.
#!/bin/bash
# Test all given edges
domain="$1"
origin="$2"
proto=http
if [ -n "$3" ]; then
proto="$3"
fi
if [ -z "$domain" ]; then
printf "Please pass the domain as first argument.\n"
exit 1
fi
if ! ping -c 1 4.2.2.1 >/dev/null; then
# printf "We are offline. Not running.\n"
exit 1
fi
ips=$(dig +short "$domain")
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
# printf "DNS lookup failure. Not running.\n"
exit 1
fi
if [ -n "$origin" ]; then
ips="$ips $origin"
fi
l=
if [ "$proto" = "https" ]; then
l=-l
fi
for ip in $ips; do
date=$(date +%Y.%m.%d-%H:%M)
for i in 1 2 3; do
out=$(httping $l -m -t 5 -c 1 --divert-connect "$ip" "$proto://$domain")
[ -z "$out" ] && out=1
printf "%s %s %s\n" "$date" "$ip" "$out"
done
done
Data is from 
We're excited to announce that Debian has selected 29 interns to work with us
this summer: 4 in 
Started in 2008, 
As my readers probably are well aware, I wrote my 
What happened in the 
The fourth update in the 0.12.* series of 
Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (
More than 10 years ago, I launched 
After finishing the 
The Road to Gehenna does not bring much new game play elements, but loads of new riddles. And the best of all, playable on Linux! And as with the original game, the graphics are really well done, while still be playable on my Vaio Pro laptop with Intel integrated graphic card a plus that is rare in the world of computer games where everyone is expected to have a high-end nVidia or Radeon card. Ok, there is not much action going on where quick graphic computations are necessary, still the impression of the game is great.
The riddles contain the well known elements (connectors, boxes, jammer, etc), but the settings are often spectacular, sometimes very small and narrow, just a few moves if done in the right order, sometimes like wide open fields with lots of space to explore. Transportation between various islands suspended in the air is with vents, giving you a lot of nice flight time!
If one searches a lot, or uses a bit of cheating, one can find good old friends from the Portal series, burried in the sand in one of the world. This is not the only easter egg hidden in the game, there are actually a lot, some of which I have not seen but only read about afterwards. Guess I need to replay the whole game.
Coming back to the riddles, I really believe that the makers have been ingenious in using the few items at hand to create challenging and surprising riddles. As it is so often, many of the riddles look completely impossible at first glance, and often even after staring at them for tens and tens of minutes. Until (and if) one has the the a-ha effect and understands the trick. This often still needs a lot of handwork and trial-error rounds, but all in all the game is well balanced. What is a bit a pain similar to the original game are collecting the stars to reach the hidden world and free the admin. There the developers overdid it in my opinion, with some rather absurd and complicated stars.
The end of the game, ascension of the messengers, is rather unspectacular. A short discussion on who remains and then a big closing scene with the messenger being beamed up a la Starship Enterprise, and a closing black screen. But well, the fun was with the riddles.
All in all an extension that is well worth the investment if one enjoyed the original Talos, and is looking for rather challenging riddles. Now that I have finished all the Portal and Talos titles, I am hard thinking of what is next looking into Braid
Enjoy!