Mongo56.org Admin blog

The end of the road.

2005-11-29T17:35:00.000+01:00

As of December 1st 2005 Mongo56.org will no-longer exist. I am sorry about this, but after over a month of battling flood attacks and the like it's time to kill the tracker.

The flood play a large part in my decision, but they are by far not the only reason.The number of donations are not covering the server costs, (€35 last month), and I really can't afford to keep supporting the site, there are also many other reasons NONE of which have anything to do with legal threats etc.

During our time in the BitTorrent community, we have really made a differences and a huge impression. We have worked directly with admin and developers from all aspects of the community, for instance we became the first XBNBT based tracker to run with over 100,000 peers, we broke the XBTT record with over 763,000 peers.

But it's time to say goodbye and thank you to everyone who ever graced us with your .torrents. I have had a wonderful time running the site and have loved every minute of it, but now it's just not fun anymore and it should be.

I want to give my personal thanks to the following people who over the last few years really helped make Mongo what it was.

Emma, Hyrle, =Xotic=, Varlock, XTF, Niek, 2Dog, UnSpawn, The_8472, Confused_Fish, Rhomboid, Sloncek and Gert. And many many more I have forgotten.

We have also worked closely with many sites, to name a few;

kerrazy-torrents.net, torrentmind.com, filesoup.co.uk, newtorrents.info, mininova.org, suprnova.org, mybittorrent.com, #VTV and many many more.

As for what the future holds, who knows, I am sure Mongo will come back in some form or another, maybe another huge leap like V1 to V2 was, who knows, but we will no longer be a BitTorrent tracker anymore. For those looking for alternates, just look around, you will soon find a new home, for those wanting code, it's all original XBTT code.

Goodbye and thanks again!

Love it, hate it, remember it!

English_Man

IP filtering...

2005-11-19T22:02:00.000+01:00

Mongo56.org now filters IP's.

We now have a system in place to deny access to the tracker for selected IP's. The IP's included in the Level #1, Level #2, Level #3 and Dshield block list's are currently being denied. Level #1 will be updated daily.

With the help of Niek (Mininova.org admin) we have a script that can convert the block list to a MySQL database. This is then read by the XBTT tracker (Thanks Olaf), and creates the block list protection. Every connection to the tracker is checked against those IP's in the database and if an IP is identified as being in the database then the connection is closed. The bad IP's receive no data from the tracker.

We are hoping that this action will help reduce the number of fake files that have reportedly been using Mongo56.org as the tracker. This will not fix the problem 100% but it will help.
--
Yours:

English_Man
Mongo56 BitTorrent Tracker Team.
P2Punite.net

Light @ the end of the tunnel...

2005-11-16T19:43:00.000+01:00

Well, things are starting to look up, I think.

I have just updated the tracker code to the latest version of XBTT, the new code offers a feature that allows us to ban IP's from using the tracker, but not the server, this will be really use full for our next step of cracking down on fake files. This is not in effect yet, but I and other BitTorrent community members will work on this later this week.

We have also welcomed 2 new members to our staff, both of whom have a great deal of knowledge about Linux and hosting on a large scale. Between the new recruits and the rest of the staff, we hope to get these problems fixed and the implement precautions to help prevent such things happening again.

The tracker does seem usable at the moment, port 3434 remains offline, but all other ports do seem responsive and all looks ok at the moment. More investigation into port 3434 is underway so don't be surprised if there is some more downtime.

Thanks to everyone who has supported us this far, and we appreciate all your kind words, I don't want to close down the site, and with the help of the old and new staff, I hope we can keep us alive a little longer. If you wish to help, please use the donation link to the right, every little helps, and if we need to purchase more bandwidth again, we will indeed need more donations.

--
Yours:

English_Man
Mongo56 BitTorrent Tracker Team.
P2Punite.net

The end is NIGH

2005-11-10T22:30:00.000+01:00

Hi there. I don't really now what to say, so I will start with the facts.

Mongo56.org has been under attack by unknown IP's for a long time now using port 3434, a public tracker port, with the tracker listening on this port, it renders the tracker useless as the attack consumes all the available bandwidth.

Well, as of the 9th November 2005, an attack has started on another port, at present I don't know which one, nor who is doing this.

So, we are now faced with a very hard decision, do we close down mongo56.org for good, and let the them win, or we just let the attacks happen, and allow maybe 1 in every 100,000 peers connect.

Well, we are going to go for option 2, I will leave the tracker running on all port EXCEPT 3434 until the end of November, if the attacks have stopped and the tracker is once again usable, then mongo56.org will continue, if the attacks have not stopped then we will be forced to close down the site on 1st December 2005.

My personal apologies to all, but my hands are tied, I hope you understand, we are only human after all.

--
Yours:

English_Man

Important!

2005-10-30T15:38:00.000+01:00

We are still experiencing that mysterious problem with port 3434, which causes connection problems for approximately 350,000 connected peers.

Have no worries - there's a fix!

If you've downloaded a torrent with the announce http://mongo56.org:3434/announce, simply open the torrent up with Maketorrent - second tab "View/Edit Torrent" and change the tracker announce to http://mongo56.org:3535/announce, click save - and the torrent will work anyways. This is also doable in clients that support editing of torrents.

You can also use the command line; For linux;
$btreannounce.py http://mongo56.org:3535/announce /path/to/.torrent
For windows;
>python btreannounce.py http://mongo56.org:3535/announce c:\path\to.torrent

Feel free to spread this message around, to help out all that are having problems!

We're working on it best we can, but during this your torrent is by no means beyond reach, providing you edit it as instructed above and the existing peers stick to it. Meanwhile, when creating a new torrent to be released, use the announce url http://mongo56.org:3535/announce, which is working properly.

Really sorry about this, we're doing all we can to sort this out! //mongo staff

It's happening again

2005-10-26T21:39:00.000+02:00

Port 3434 is currently offline (again!) due to the continuation of last
week's attacks. The staff is currently working very hard to identify the
individual or group responsible for this. Hang in there, everybody, and
hopefully this will be sorted out shortly!

//emma (mongo56.org public relations)

Its official....

2005-10-25T19:28:00.000+02:00

Mongo56.org v2 can now boast to be the biggest public BitTorrent tracker based on XBTT code. We have just broken the existing record of 763,740 peers.

At the time of writing, we have the following statistics;

Total peers: 774,354
total seeders: 257,869
total leechers: 516,485
Total torrents: 34,328

This is great news, we have taken the record, just a few days after we were under attack from unknown sources. All is working fine now, and with our recent bandwidth upgrade we are looking forward to breaking 1Million peers.

Thanks to everyone who uses Mongo56.org, and thanks for helping to make us one of the major players in the public tracker scene. Also thanks to those of you who have donated, and to those who wish to, please see the links column.

--
Yours:

English_Man
Mongo56 BitTorrent Tracker Team.

Head above water...

2005-10-23T22:00:00.000+02:00

Mongo56.org has been restored to its full service now, all ports are once again functioning as they should. The past few days have proved really difficult for us, but I am please to say we are still online.

We are still none the wiser as to what happened, we know that an 'SMURF IP Denial-of-Service Attack' using the ICMP protocol, was targeted at Mongo56.org, we also know that our public port 3434 was under some form of a flood attack.

We are still looking into this, and working hard on finding a way to prevent future attacks of this nature. From now on, we urge all users to use port 3535 instead of 3434 in case this flood attack resumes, simply use the following announce instead; http://mongo56.org:3535/announce

Another feature we are working on, along with other BT admins, is the ability to block bad IP's from the tracker. The current ways o blocking IP lists using IPTables puts too much strain on the system, so we are looking at a way of using a simple SQL database instead, more info.

So, hopefully everything is working ok again, and we are looking good for our new target of 1Million peers, so lets get seeding.
--
Yours:

English_Man
Mongo56 BitTorrent Tracker Team.

Update

2005-10-22T11:11:00.000+02:00

I have been looking closer at what is happening to the server/tracker. The good news is the ICMP flood has stopped, but there is another type of flood happening on our public tracker port 3434.

As I have no way of determining which packets to 3434 are valid tracker packets are witch are useless I have no option but to disable port 3434 for now.

When I allow port 3434, the servers incoming bandwidth gets used up, all 15Mbps of it. The usual bandwidth usage is around 2 Mbps more incoming then outgoing, but right now we are seeing over double.

I have spoken to some other BT admin, and in the true BT way they are very helpful and trying to solve this problem for all of us.

I will keep you all informed via here, and hopefully we can work out what packets are false packets and filter them. Hopefully port 3434 can come back online sometime soon.

All other ports are working, and should work fine, for public .torrent please use port 3535. If you have a .torrent with using port 3434, change the announce to 3535 and it will continue to be tracked. Once again I apologise for the inconvenience this is causing.

--
Yours:

English_Man
Mongo56 BitTorrent Tracker Team.

I spoke to soon

2005-10-22T10:27:00.000+02:00

Its all happening again, I am now going to try and get to the bottom of this.

--
Yours:

English_Man
Mongo56 BitTorrent Tracker Team.

Normaility again

2005-10-21T19:25:00.000+02:00

The tracker is back online, and the attack has stopped.

We are not really sure what it was, why or how it happened or even why or how it stopped, but it has.

Almost exactly 24 hours after the attack began, it stopped.

We will continue to investigate this, and hopefully find some answers to the questions I am sure we all have.

--
Yours:

English_Man
Mongo56 BitTorrent Tracker Team.

Drowning in a river of PING

2005-10-21T17:09:00.000+02:00

I am sorry to have to say this again, but the tracker, (mongo56.org) has been taken offline once again. This is due to the continuation of the ICMP flood attack that started yesterday around 18:00 GMT+1.

The flood attack started to die down last night, so the tracker was restarted, and everything was ok for a little while, until the flood attack started again. So I have been forced to shut down the tracker once again.

What this flood attack does, is basically sends thousands of small ICMP packets to the server, the server then has to reply with a much larger packet, thus using our bandwidth. If we receive hundreds or thousands of these packets per second, you can see how our bandwidth gets used up, and the site/tracker becomes unreachable and unusable.

I have contacted our host, asking them to filter all ICMP packets via the router as we have no need for ICMP/PING anyway. This is a copy of the email I have sent:

Hi there, my server/ip 83.149.104.32 has been receiving a ICMP flood for the past 24 hours. The site its self is completely un-reachable, even SSH is proving very difficult to use. I have stopped all services on my server, and we are STILL using between 6 and 8 Mbps in and out.

Could you please block all ICMP packets using the router, as I have no need for ICMP or PING. If you could do this asap so I can stop this attack and to prevent a future attack.

Thanks in advance.

Once I receive confirmation from my host that the packets are indeed being filtered, and I see that we have our full bandwidth back, the tracker will be restarted.

I do apologise for this, downtime is really not what I wanted, especially as we were so closed to the XBTT record. However, we do have a little good news, the additional bandwidth is available to us, so we should be able to reach 1Million once these attacks stop.
--
Yours:

English_Man
Mongo56 BitTorrent Tracker Team.

Back to normal, ISH

2005-10-20T22:27:00.000+02:00

We are still suffering a little bit with the bandwidth, not really sure what it is, but we wil continue to monitor it.

All is back online now, and I apologise for the downtime!

--
Yours:

English_Man
Mongo56 BitTorrent Tracker Team.

Mongo OFFLINE for now

2005-10-20T21:18:00.000+02:00

Something is using all the bandwidth, with the tracker STOPPED. We are investigating this now, and hope to have everything back to normal ASAP.

Please don't jump to conclusions and start talking about DoS attracts and the likes intill we know for sure what is/has happened.

--
Yours:

English_Man
Mongo56 BitTorrent Tracker Team.

Additional bandwidth ordered

2005-10-19T21:27:00.000+02:00

I have just purchased an additional 5Mbps line from our host. This takes our usable bandwidth total to 15Mbps each way.

Looking at the current rate of growth and the current bandwidth usages, I hope this level of bandwidth will take us to and over 1Million peers.

The total cost for the Mongo56 v2 server is now €129 per month. Please donate if you can, so we can continue to offer this level of service.

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English_Man

XBTT record within our sights.

2005-10-19T21:12:00.000+02:00

At 21:00 GMT+1 Mongo56 v2 reached yet another milestone. The peer count of an incredible 700,000 has arrived.

At this very moment Mongo56 v2 has the following statistics:

Total peers: 702,374
total seeders: 225,027
total leechers: 477,347
Total torrents: 30,612

XBTT (the tracker software we use), has a current record of 763,740. Obviously Mongo56 v2 is going to beat this and become the largest ever XBTT based tracker.

So, our new goal is 764,000 peers, do you think we can do it? Once we reach this goal, lets set our sights bigger, and go for the 1Million peers.

-----------------
English_Man

Weird things

2005-10-17T16:35:00.000+02:00

Something weird happened today with the tracker, for some reason the tracker binary just stalled, not allowing any more /announce or /scrape calls. I don't know when this happened or why but its been restarted now.

I will investigate this now and report it to the author of the code if that appears to be what is causing the issues.

--------
Yours:

English_Man

Mongo56 V2's future solutions

2005-10-15T18:13:00.000+02:00

As the peer count rises and rises so does the server load. The shear amount of connections that the server has to deal with starts to drain the cpu and memory resources.

The current server that hosts Mongo56.org has the following statistics:

Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz
1GB DDR Memory
1x 80 GB SATA HD
10Mbps (Flatfee) Volume

This server is working fine, and with the current load of over 600k peers we are using the following resources;

CPU usage: 38.1%
MEM usage: 31964k free
Load average: 0.35, 0.51, 0.50

So we can take a higher load on the server, however the bandwidth is needing an upgrade. We currently have a 10Mbps line, this line we can use 10Mbps both incoming and outgoing. At the moment we are using an average of 6.3Mbps incoming and 7.6Mbps outgoing.

I estimate that around 750,000 peers we will need to purchase an additional 5Mbps line from our host, giving us a total of 15Mbps each way. This should take us to and beyond 1Million.

Once we reach the limit of the server, we will need to make some bigger changes, we will need to purchase an additional server and create a cluster. All connections will come into server #1 and IPTables will filter the connections. All ports A-D will be tracked by server #1 and ports E-G will be tracked by server #2.

Both servers will use the same MySQL database so they will act as one server/tracker tracking many ports.

That's what the future has in store, as long as the users donate, then the site will stay online and we will try to offer the same level of service that you have grown accustomed too.

----------------
English_Man

Over 600,000 peers and rising

2005-10-15T13:24:00.000+02:00

This weekend we have seen the peer count rise yet again, mongo56.org is now tracking an amazing 621,280 peers as I write this. The current status of the tracker is as follows;

Total peers: 621,992
total seeders: 211,781
total leechers: 410,211
Total torrents: 28,648

Our bandwidth is running very thin now, I am talking to our host and trying to get a good deal on a upgrade. Our current bandwidth usage for October 2005 is as follows;

Thanks to everyone who is using mongo and allowing it to grow and allowing us to improve our service and remain a true '100% Public-100% Free' tracker.

Admin blog ONLINE

2005-10-15T13:08:00.000+02:00

Today we have decided to start an Admin blog, this will be used to update everyone on mongo56.org's server and service status. Thanks to Mininova for the idea.

This is going to become the FIRST place our staff post news and updates so please remember to check here frequently.

Its hosted by blogger at the moment, blogger is owned by google so I have full faith and trust in their service, the advantage of having it hosted off of our servers is the fact that it will still be online if our servers go down, so you can always get the information.

The template of this blog is just a test, it will change in the near future, but for now, its doing its job.

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English_Man