Cotse turns two

Well, two years have passed. It was Mar 25th, 1999 when the line was installed and on April 1, 1999 our first web server went on-line. It was a small server, a P200 with 64 meg RAM running Solaris 7 x86 and Apache. This was more than enough machine then as we did about 1000 hits a day, most of them from us as we developed the site. What we didn't expect was that within three months that server would be struggling with over 150,000 hits a day. We thought that was phenomenal. 150k hits a day on our small relatively unknown site. In a way it was phenomenal. It was phenomenal that this little P200 with only 64 meg of RAM could handle that, but it did. It performed like a champ and made Solaris fanatics of us all. When I first set up this box I received some guff about "slowaris", but our little server quickly proved those claims wrong. That server has since been retired from the limelight and now runs as a node on a friends network, but Solaris remains our platform of choice. Cotse now pulls nearly 3 million hits a week. Our machines are bigger now, no longer x86, and we cluster, but Solaris still serves Cotse, and it always will. Now we are two years old. It has been some ride. As I mentioned above, Cotse now does nearly 3 million hits a week. But what I have not mentioned are the attacks. We have not grown without our share of controversy. That controversy makes us a target. Cotse sustains an average of 1500 attacks a day, every one of them logged and databased for future reference. Within hours of an exploit hitting the public lists there are numerous people attempting it on our servers. We have been DoS attacked, Mailbombed, and had nearly every exploit I have seen tried against our systems, even NT and IIS exploits (tells you something about the knowledge level of most attackers). We set up multiple intrusion detection systems and honeypots. We log attacks and attempts to multiple devices, including a printer. Cotse has become something of a research lab for us. If it is out there on the net, someone will try it on our servers. All in all it has been a wild ride. Cotse has been a great success and a phenomenal learning experience for us. We are still growing by leaps and bounds, the site itself is now almost seven gig in size, and traffic just keeps increasing. The press has begun to recognize us and we expect that this time next year we'll be at double our current traffic. Cotse will soon be offering new services and software. Some of the programs we have developed to monitor our site will be released to the public. Our privacy webmail and anonymous web proxy will spawn a brother, a complete on-line privacy and security solution. And many of us will find Cotse becoming our only job this year. Thanks to every one of our dedicated users for making us a successful site! We will continue to provide you with the services you have become accustomed to from Cotse. We will also provide you with new services and features. If you think Cotse is impressive now, all we can say is "You ain't seen nothin yet". /steve 4/01/2001