daniel.haxx.se

Several sites in the haxx.se domain and other stuff related to me and my fellows were completely offline for almost 50 hours between August 24th 19:00 UTC and August 26th 20:30 UTC.

The sites affected included the main web sites for the following projects: curl, c-ares, trio, libssh2 and Rockbox. It also affected mailing lists and CVS repositories etc for some of those.

The reason for the outage has been explained by the ISP (Black Internet) to be because of some kind of sabotage. Their explanation given so far (first in Swedish):

Strax efter kl 20 i måndags drabbades Black Internet och Black Internets kunder av ett mycket allvarligt sabotage. Sabotaget gjordes mot flera av våra core-switchar, våra knutpunkter. Detta resulterade i ett mer eller mindre totalt avbrott för oss och våra kunder. Vi har polisanmält händelsen och har ett bra samarbete med dem.

Translated to English (by me) it becomes:

Soon after 8pm on Monday, Black Internet and its customers were struck by a very serious act of sabotage. The sabotage was made against several of our core switches. This resulted in a more or less total disruption of service for us and our customers. We have reported the incident to the police and we have a good cooperation with them.

Do note that you could keep track of this situation by following me on twitter.

It’s good to be back. Let’s hope it’ll take ages until we go away like that again!

Update: according to my sources, someone erased/cleared Black Internet’s core routers and then they learned that they had no working backups so they had to restore everything by hand.

With a few bug fixes and general improvements, c-ares 1.6.0 was released just now with these new additions:

• support for the glibc “rotate” resolv.conf option (or ARES_OPT_ROTATE)
• ares_gethostbyname_file()
• ares_dup()
• ares_set_socket_callback()

(the man pages for the new functions are not yet available on the web site but I’m meaning to get to that soonish)

Finally I pulled myself together and made c-ares.haxx.se the new official URL for the c-ares project, and to celebrate the occasion we now also have an “official” project logo (thanks to Jeff Pohlmeyer):

I’m happy to announce the release of c-ares 1.5.3. c-ares is an asynchronous name resolver and somewhat generic DNS library with a liberal MIT-style license.

The news this time include:

• fix adig sample application compilation failure on some systems
• fix pkg-config reporting of private libraries needed for static linking
• fallback to gettimeofday when monotonic clock is unavailable at run-time
• ares_gethostbyname() fallback from AAA to A records with CNAME present
• allow –enable-largefile and –disable-largefile configurations
• configure process no longer needs nor checks size of curl_off_t
• library will now be built with _REENTRANT symbol defined if needed
• Improved configure detection of number of arguments for getservbyport_r
• Improved query-ID randomness
• Validate that DNS response address matches the request address
• fix acountry sample application compilation failure on some systems

I’m also happy to see that the development version of Wireshark is currently using c-ares.

If you’re a graphics person, we’ll appreciate some kind of logo/symbol thing for the project!

I’m involved in numerous projects, and a subset of them take a lot of my “copious” spare time. This has the unfortunate downside that a few other projects get left behind a bit. Projects that also really could use with some more attention and improvements. Two of the most obvious examples of this are c-ares and libssh2. Coincidentally, both of these projects are also used by libcurl (although of course also by others).

c-ares is a library that performs asynchronous DNS lookups. It is quite mature and functional already, as it is based on the ares project and has been proved in use for quite some time. There are currently one or two issues that have appeared recently when the Debian project tried to provide the curl package built with c-ares…

libssh2 is a client library for talking SSH2 with servers. There are actually not very many SSH libraries “out there”, and in an evaluation I did a few years ago libssh2 was the best one around. libcurl uses libssh2 for SCP and SFTP transfers, and it (libssh2) does suffer from a few API flaws, a few bugs and perhaps most noticably it is significantly slower than the openssh tools in just about all transfer tests.

I’m still highly involved in both of these projects, but lack of time prevents me from participating as much as I’d like to.

With over six months since the previous c-ares release, I’m happy to announce that I’ve just uploaded the 1.5.2 tarball to the usual c-ares project place.

The changes aren’t major in any way, but they’re improvements and they’re pushing c-ares forwards. You can browse the RELEASE-NOTES off the cvsweb.

SONAME bump and more is included in the fresh new c-ares release, when the changes from the Google camp was incorporated. There have also been a fair bunch of bug fixes that should make this the best c-ares version so far.

There are some indications c-ares is coming to Debian. It seems to already be packaged and made available for at least Fedora, Gentoo, OpenSuse and more…

Update: I quickly released a 1.5.1 since I messed up with the 1.5.0 which didn’t build out of the tarball…