Silk Road forums

Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: dopamine on January 30, 2012, 06:55 pm

Title: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: dopamine on January 30, 2012, 06:55 pm
if admin can't keep the servers up then why should i trust them with my money? if you aren't able to do it yourself hire someone! it's not that hard. i have run servers, by myself, with millions of uniques a month with 99.99+% uptime and i am not the greatest admin.

every time the site goes down i wonder if it will be the last.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: seratin on January 30, 2012, 07:04 pm
Ignorance like yours is why security gets downgraded for usability.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: MagicMan on January 30, 2012, 07:58 pm
You're totally right, you shouldn't trust Silk, run while you still can!
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: CHROOT on January 30, 2012, 08:11 pm
it's not that hard. i have run servers, by myself, with millions of uniques a month with 99.99+% uptime and i am not the greatest admin.

Maintaining a server on the clearnet can be done by that octopus that can predict world cup matches. Keeping a site like SR up requires skills.

It's not just the US Govt out to crush them, it's MOST governments, and then you have to throw in the hacker groups that think SR is immoral and needs to die.

Frankly, I'm surprised it's as resilient as it is.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: demarcko on January 30, 2012, 08:26 pm
if admin can't keep the servers up then why should i trust them with my money? if you aren't able to do it yourself hire someone! it's not that hard. i have run servers, by myself, with millions of uniques a month with 99.99+% uptime and i am not the greatest admin.

every time the site goes down i wonder if it will be the last.

That's cool. Less people on SR means less attention which means more for me.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: reverb on January 30, 2012, 08:50 pm
Frankly, I'm surprised it's as resilient as it is.

So right. SR admins: I for one appreciate the effort and continued up-time.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: doublemint on January 30, 2012, 11:02 pm
Yeah, because WHENEVER SR is down it's because they cant maintain the site. Not updates or anything.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: sonic on January 31, 2012, 01:02 am
Yeah, because WHENEVER SR is down it's because they cant maintain the site. Not updates or anything.

The last real update made was to raise the fees.  The only consistent aspect of SR has been its inconsistency and regular downtime.  What good is paying for an escrow service that can't stay up, and a bitcoin wallet that may or may not be available when you need it?

SR is a good little experiment, and has taken the age old mail order scene a tiny step forward, but it will be replaced as soon as a stable and reputable market comes around to fill the void.

Even the smallest hiccup fucks the entire order process up.  On Friday/Saturday when SR was down for the majority of the day, orders that should have shipped Saturday were delayed until Monday because SR was inaccessible.  Time is money, how much time have we lost to greed? 

Take that huge bundle of bitcoins you get from us for doing essentially nothing, and actually use it to upgrade the infrastructure of the site.  Is it too much to ask that after raising fees on us we could see some of that money being put to use making the site actually functional?  I'm calling it now, when the downfall of SilkRoad does come, Silk will leave no advance notice and will jump ship with thousands hedged and deposited in accounts.  We'll see what SumYunGai did, but on a site-wide level.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: warweed on January 31, 2012, 01:33 am
i monitor sr very closely it is rarely down when people ask if it's down it's generally because there tor fucking sucks or there relay / node sucks ass

Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: dopamine on January 31, 2012, 02:06 am
Ignorance like yours is why security gets downgraded for usability.

why do u think security requires poor usability? they are not mutually exclusive, u can have both.

Yeah, because WHENEVER SR is down it's because they cant maintain the site. Not updates or anything.

that would be even worse. not being able to handle traffic and/or managing the server(s) well is one thing. a shit deployment process that shows no concern for users is another. taking the site down for updates without warning and without a landing page is extremely unprofessional. no professional would do something like that. even in an emergency they would get a placeholder page up as quickly as possible. with the tools available now there is no excuse for taking the site down for regular updates.

The last real update made was to raise the fees.  The only consistent aspect of SR has been its inconsistency and regular downtime.  What good is paying for an escrow service that can't stay up, and a bitcoin wallet that may or may not be available when you need it?

SR is a good little experiment, and has taken the age old mail order scene a tiny step forward, but it will be replaced as soon as a stable and reputable market comes around to fill the void.

Even the smallest hiccup fucks the entire order process up.  On Friday/Saturday when SR was down for the majority of the day, orders that should have shipped Saturday were delayed until Monday because SR was inaccessible.  Time is money, how much time have we lost to greed? 

Take that huge bundle of bitcoins you get from us for doing essentially nothing, and actually use it to upgrade the infrastructure of the site.  Is it too much to ask that after raising fees on us we could see some of that money being put to use making the site actually functional?  I'm calling it now, when the downfall of SilkRoad does come, Silk will leave no advance notice and will jump ship with thousands hedged and deposited in accounts.  We'll see what SumYunGai did, but on a site-wide level.

you said it better than me. i see it being a much bigger problem for sellers than buyers. sellers have more riding on the line. if SR disappears i lose the buy order(s) i have in escrow, not a lot of money. but many sellers have a lot more to lose.

i monitor sr very closely it is rarely down when people ask if it's down it's generally because there tor fucking sucks or there relay / node sucks ass

then maybe you have insight on why someone would be able to easily access this forum but not access silk road. unless relays are blocking SR and not the forum why would there be a problem?
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: hairyballs on January 31, 2012, 02:11 am
Only complaints coming from people who has been here a month and a week respectively? Troll harder.

Most people here would rather a few hours downtime a week, than compromising security.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: enddox on January 31, 2012, 05:38 am
I don't think just because someone is new that their points are invalid.

I have the utmost respect for SR and its operators but a small official notice letting us know what is going on and perhaps a rough timeline for getting the site back in full gear, which would take 5 mins to put together, would put a LOT of people at ease.

Like many peeps I'm in the middle of transactions as a buyer so I can only imagine the stress the vendors must be under.

Meanwhile the BTC price fluctuates so that adds another point of stress to the whole situation.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: xx138xx on January 31, 2012, 05:57 am
I've yet to see any signs that would lead me to believe the problem is with the site itself. When a server gets overloaded the first thing to go tits up tends to be the database in my experience (runs out of memory or connections). Even with error reporting turned off, there would still be symptoms of this occuring. In reality, most of the downtime I've seen on here coincides with overloaded nodes preceeding SR's server. Even my clearnet sites get a lot of traffic from assholes running port scans, database injection scanners, and people trying to ddos sites so you can imagine the amount of garbage traffic aimed at Sr on any given day and it is beyond their control. The same shit gets thrown at sites like Facebook every day. They just have the budget to have enough capacity to shake it off easily.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: I am a Cat on January 31, 2012, 01:34 pm
if admin can't keep the servers up then why should i trust them with my money? if you aren't able to do it yourself hire someone! it's not that hard. i have run servers, by myself, with millions of uniques a month with 99.99+% uptime and i am not the greatest admin.

every time the site goes down i wonder if it will be the last.

Yeah, because WHENEVER SR is down it's because they cant maintain the site. Not updates or anything.

The last real update made was to raise the fees.  The only consistent aspect of SR has been its inconsistency and regular downtime.  What good is paying for an escrow service that can't stay up, and a bitcoin wallet that may or may not be available when you need it?

SR is a good little experiment, and has taken the age old mail order scene a tiny step forward, but it will be replaced as soon as a stable and reputable market comes around to fill the void.

Even the smallest hiccup fucks the entire order process up.  On Friday/Saturday when SR was down for the majority of the day, orders that should have shipped Saturday were delayed until Monday because SR was inaccessible.  Time is money, how much time have we lost to greed? 

Take that huge bundle of bitcoins you get from us for doing essentially nothing, and actually use it to upgrade the infrastructure of the site.  Is it too much to ask that after raising fees on us we could see some of that money being put to use making the site actually functional?  I'm calling it now, when the downfall of SilkRoad does come, Silk will leave no advance notice and will jump ship with thousands hedged and deposited in accounts.  We'll see what SumYunGai did, but on a site-wide level.

Ughghgh I know! I am in 100% agreement that the admins that are running a totally illegal website wherein I acquire illegal drugs wherein I don't have to leave my house are making it so hard on me! I too am upset that the drugs I ordered on Friday don't ship until Monday. What a sham! Useless. Fucking. Website. I wish the d-bag admins, which probably have it easy and don't deal with vendors complaints, both legitimate and scammers, would bend to my specific needs. I don't like having to buy stuff at below market rates then sit on my fat neckbeard ass and wait for the mail man to deliver drugs to my door step. I think I'd rather brave a snow storm, sketchy neighbor hood, possibly getting knifed, ripped off, or not even getting the right drug rather than these god damn plebians >:(>:(>:(>:(>:(>:(

Grow the fuck up.

Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: Horizons on January 31, 2012, 01:44 pm
Here's a thought: don't like it? Leave. Or at least make constructive criticism instead of whining as if you're entitled to something. Silk Road isn't the only drug market on Tor. Maybe the BMR or Farmer's Market will be more to your liking? Or you can go to Freenet. Or you can track down individual vendors who operate out of their own websites. Or you can buy from your friendly neighborhood drug racket. There's many options for you to choose from, and most of them accomplish a lot more than senseless bitching.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: supersecretsquirrel on January 31, 2012, 02:28 pm
if admin can't keep the servers up then why should i trust them with my money? if you aren't able to do it yourself hire someone! it's not that hard. i have run servers, by myself, with millions of uniques a month with 99.99+% uptime and i am not the greatest admin.

SR being down may not be because the server is down or because the admins aren't doing their job. It may simply be the somewhat flaky infrastructure of Tor hidden services. You are that you run multiple servers with 99.99+% uptime - but are any of those servers set up as a Tor hidden service? Probably not.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: Evanescence on January 31, 2012, 05:39 pm
Running a clearnet site is like driving to the grocery store.  It's not that hard to make it highly reliable and predictable, and if something goes wrong along the way it's not that big of a deal to correct and continue.  The stakes are low.

Running SR is like an Apollo mission to the moon.  It's inherently unpredictable because there is such little operational precedent to go by.  You must be able to continually improvise solutions to problems that you didn't know existed.  And if some goes too wrong you can be 100% fucked with no chance of correcting or continuing.  The stakes are a high as they can get.

Still think you can do better?

if admin can't keep the servers up then why should i trust them with my money? if you aren't able to do it yourself hire someone! it's not that hard. i have run servers, by myself, with millions of uniques a month with 99.99+% uptime and i am not the greatest admin.

every time the site goes down i wonder if it will be the last.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: outflow on January 31, 2012, 06:59 pm
Here's a thought: don't like it? Leave. Or at least make constructive criticism instead of whining as if you're entitled to something. Silk Road isn't the only drug market on Tor. Maybe the BMR or Farmer's Market will be more to your liking? Or you can go to Freenet. Or you can track down individual vendors who operate out of their own websites. Or you can buy from your friendly neighborhood drug racket. There's many options for you to choose from, and most of them accomplish a lot more than senseless bitching.

word!
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: CHROOT on January 31, 2012, 11:45 pm
Crankiness aside, there are some valid concerns raised in this thread, but SR isn't even a year old yet.

Amazon will be militant about letting people know when site upgrades and downtime are coming, but honestly, I'd rather NOT have SR update us on every stage of the hardening process, for no other reason than SR's many enemies would relish info like that and most of us wouldn't understand it anyway.

Darwinism exists in onionland too, if SR degrades a dozen wannabes will sprout up in its place. Pandoras box is open.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: 46&2 on February 01, 2012, 12:57 am
i was able to log on last night. i tried today with no luck, it does not worry me.
if 2 or 3 days pass and it is still down with no word from the silkmeister then, it will be time to worry.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: Marceline on February 01, 2012, 01:05 am
The random bouts of downtime should simply not be happening. If SR needs to take down the site for periods of time to work on it, that's fine but it needs to be announced ahead of time so vendors and buyers can plan accordingly.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: LegendaryPancake on February 01, 2012, 01:22 am
I'd trade scheduled downtime for sporadic bouts of downtime, but I'm not complaining much either way. SR is an invaluable service, and I'll be glad for what I get.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: BTCBank on February 01, 2012, 01:40 am
Some interesting points have been made as well as some pretty ignorant ones. I fully understand that SR is a constant work in progress as is the Tor network and .onion routing, but in all honesty it is getting much harder for me to trust significant amounts of money to a marketplace that has appeared and crashed nearly once every 24 hours with almost no communication (if any?) from admins. The increased paranoia is probably hurting business in the short and long run and it makes it harder and harder for sellers to gain the trust that many of them so rightly deserve. I'm not pointing fingers but even just a placeholder page "e.g. 404, under construction, we'll be right back" would add, nearly double, the level of professionalism that SR already has. The random outages are even tolerable but it just keeps backing up my theory that there is some sort of DDossing occuring. Maybe i'm wrong. Maybe I'm crazy. All I really want is a quick message from an Admin every now and then. Just my 2cents.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: jerryskid on February 01, 2012, 02:22 am
Running a clearnet site is like driving to the grocery store.  It's not that hard to make it highly reliable and predictable, and if something goes wrong along the way it's not that big of a deal to correct and continue.  The stakes are low.

Running SR is like an Apollo mission to the moon.  It's inherently unpredictable because there is such little operational precedent to go by.  You must be able to continually improvise solutions to problems that you didn't know existed.  And if some goes too wrong you can be 100% fucked with no chance of correcting or continuing.  The stakes are a high as they can get.

Still think you can do better?

if admin can't keep the servers up then why should i trust them with my money? if you aren't able to do it yourself hire someone! it's not that hard. i have run servers, by myself, with millions of uniques a month with 99.99+% uptime and i am not the greatest admin.

every time the site goes down i wonder if it will be the last.


Well said....
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: cloud9ne on February 01, 2012, 02:30 am
my theory that there is some sort of DDossing occuring

Can't really DDOS a tor hidden service, maybe the entire Tor network you could try. I think the outages are just due to a huge influx in new users everytime a press article comes out and whatever KVm or Hypervisor or VM they're running get's overloaded.

I would hope they have a dedicated 1U rack for this site, and it's not a box sitting on the floor of some guy's apartment

Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: birdlover on February 01, 2012, 02:54 am
Hi,

I cannot log into SR right now and I just checked on the Is it up? site and computer said NO!

I guess this means it is down right now?

BL
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: oso on February 01, 2012, 03:05 am
Use warweeds tool

http://warweedoeg6lfyoz.onion/updown/

tell if it is up or down. I've been looking for the past day or two and his tool always said SR is up, never down yet in the last 24hrs.

Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: theonetheonlyandy on February 01, 2012, 03:05 am
yall need to stop being pissy. way to much complaining going on. need to realize this whole site is a learning curve. and with new threats requires updates and planing. yes its been down lately, but just wait it out. SR is a great site. stop complaining jeez. if you do not like the downtime make you own site and get paid. if not shut up and buy.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: BTCBank on February 01, 2012, 03:13 am
my theory that there is some sort of DDossing occuring

Can't really DDOS a tor hidden service, maybe the entire Tor network you could try. I think the outages are just due to a huge influx in new users everytime a press article comes out and whatever KVm or Hypervisor or VM they're running get's overloaded.

I would hope they have a dedicated 1U rack for this site, and it's not a box sitting on the floor of some guy's apartment

Didn't think of all of that. Just seems odd that there could be that much traffic that I consistently can't reach the site especially at 3-4AM EST when any article traffic would be minimal. I agree I really hope this is a solid rackmount server which it almost would have to be at this level of traffic. I really hope this gets resolved before this weekend I shudder to think how many sales could be lost during the valentine's day sale.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: xx138xx on February 01, 2012, 03:25 am
my theory that there is some sort of DDossing occuring

Can't really DDOS a tor hidden service, maybe the entire Tor network you could try. I think the outages are just due to a huge influx in new users everytime a press article comes out and whatever KVm or Hypervisor or VM they're running get's overloaded.

I would hope they have a dedicated 1U rack for this site, and it's not a box sitting on the floor of some guy's apartment

Very wrong. You can ddos individual nodes on the tor network and any hidden service running behind them will suffer from it. On the vidalia control panel, select "view the network". You have access to the ip addresses of nodes from this. If you were to pick one and ddos, everyone conected through it would suffer traffic degradation until they changed their route. Also take note of something else. A lot of nodes have shit bandwidth so it doesn't take much to overload their connection.

If the issue was with the server itself, be it dedicated or vps or whatever, it would show different symptoms.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: dopamine on February 01, 2012, 05:32 am
there have been some good points made in the thread by others. those who said it's not as easy as running a standard website are right. i am sure it is much harder. but still SR should have another site for status updates or post them on here. they should respond to threads like this and address some of these issues.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: enddox on February 01, 2012, 06:15 am
My personal concern is that, to my knowledge, there has not been an official notice regarding the sporadic downtime in the last few days.

Although paranoia probably has the best of me I just wish we could be 100% sure that SR is still under control of the same people as before the current events.

I would hate to find that in a couple of months down the track we find everything has been being recorded and a shitload of arrests are made.

Please, please could we have an official notice? Please?
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: cloud9ne on February 01, 2012, 06:20 am
Quote
Very wrong. You can ddos individual nodes on the tor network and any hidden service running behind them will suffer from it. On the vidalia control panel, select "view the network". You have access to the ip addresses of nodes from this. If you were to pick one and ddos, everyone conected through it would suffer traffic degradation until they changed their route. Also take note of something else. A lot of nodes have shit bandwidth so it doesn't take much to overload their connection.

Yeah

You can't really DDOS a hidden service directly, but you can group DDOS the relays/nodes in effect, attacking the whole tor network. So you agree lol

Should also be a i2p SR site



Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: warweed on February 01, 2012, 07:25 am
My tool located in my profile is always 100% accurate and is impossible to give a false reading watch it closely the only possible way it could give a false positive is if i lost power and internet to my server and even then it would give nothing because my hidden service would be down my tool is rather simple and by design is so simple that it would be impossible for it to fuck up :)
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: mezzrow on February 01, 2012, 06:15 pm
I don't have the balls to post my tool in my profile ;) 
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: Horizons on February 01, 2012, 07:38 pm
I don't have the balls to post my tool in my profile ;)

If you have no balls, then it's probably for the best.  ;D
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: OuterLimits on February 01, 2012, 09:49 pm
There have been a lot of times that people  have been reporting that SR has been down and I've still been able to access it. Now during those times when it was reported to be down, I have noticed that sometimes it takes awhile to make that initial connection to get to the login screen, but once the initial connection is made and I've logged in than I can continue to browse without any issues. Once I have disconnected  from TOR, I seem to have issues connecting again for awhile. I'm thinking that it's not an issue with SR servers, but more of an issue with the TOR relays that you are connected to reaching SR. If you are having problems, try clicking on "Use New Identity" in the Vidalia Control Panel, and continue to try accessing SR until you reach it....
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: germanicus on February 01, 2012, 11:16 pm
Warweed is right.  SR is up and running just fine.  I just think some of the machinery has been getting overloaded.  I have tried logging on about ten times over the past twenty-four hours, and I have been successful five of those times.  You just have to keep trying.  I am logged in right now.

I am not going to get involved in the other issues on this thread, but suffice to say that—as a non-seller—I have no complaints about the way SR handles outages and downtimes, and I do not think announcements are a good idea.

I think the reason SR never came over here to the forums to mention anything is because SR never went down in the first place.  It's just been really busy.  Warweed's status updater seems to agree with that conjecture.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: sonic on February 02, 2012, 12:01 am
Only complaints coming from people who has been here a month and a week respectively? Troll harder.

Most people here would rather a few hours downtime a week, than compromising security.

I'll not be lectured by a person named 'hairyballs.'  You're implying someone's account creation date is when they emerged here?  Or even that any given account isn't the new account of an old account?  Security is fundamentally compromised insomuch as a sole individual (SR) has access to every bit of plaintext and financial information.  If things ever go sour with LEOs, you can bet a deal will be offered.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: germanicus on February 02, 2012, 12:55 am
Security is fundamentally compromised insomuch as a sole individual (SR) has access to every bit of plaintext and financial information.  If things ever go sour with LEOs, you can bet a deal will be offered.

So how do you know that SR is a "sole individual," or if there is any "sole individual" behind that moniker in the first place?  Have you met him?

You have every right not to trust something for any reason you want—in which case, head for the door.  But impugning the character and trustworthiness of the people who all put here in the first place is not the most gallant of strategies for solving anything.
Title: Re: Downtime is making me lose confidence in SR
Post by: kaczty on February 02, 2012, 05:35 am
I'm able to get on SR right now - I think some nodes might be blocking connection? I had to reload Vidalia a couple times to get it to connect.