The JEM server was down most of today, Saturday, September 27. The JEM server is located in a machine room of the Physics Department, and, of course, none of the administrators of the machine room was reachable off hours. Together with Antti Alamäki I then went to Campus, got the security guard to let us in to the machine room, and rebooted ubu, the JEM server.

The reason for the downtime was distributed denial of service attack that started this morning. The attack apparently came from California or China, but it may, of course, actually be orchestrated from anywhere.

Perhaps it already is a recognition that somebody finds it worth his or her while to bring our server down. Perhaps a group of kids is only practicing, or perhaps somebody got upset of my last blog entry. We will probably never find out.

This reminded me of my visit years ago to the Mathematics Research Institute in Oberwolfach, Germany. We were shown around at the Institute. I was pleased to see that the library was always open, and people were able to take books to their rooms without having to show ids to the librarians. There were no librarians sitting in the library! I asked, how many books they loose a year? Wouldn't it be better to have a librarian to check that books will not get stolen?

The person answering could not say how many books get stolen, but told about this one meeting during which some chapters, relevant to that particular meeting, were cut out of some books! It seems that the academia is not any better than the rest of the society.

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