Ebay Bid Jamming?

[jazzykat]

I was just stopped from bidding on a playset of Volrath's Stronghold's this afternoon by network traffic (?). However, as soon as the auction ended the page refreshed in under a second to tell me that I was too late.

To anyone's knowledge is there a way to spam ebay packets or something as it appeared VERY fishy.

[URABAHN]

I was just stopped from bidding on a playset of Volrath's Stronghold's this afternoon by network traffic (?). However, as soon as the auction ended the page refreshed in under a second to tell me that I was too late.

To anyone's knowledge is there a way to spam ebay packets or something as it appeared VERY fishy.

If I'm understanding this right, you tried to bid on something, but your connection was slow. When you refreshed the page, you were too late and you lost the auction? Why do you think that's fishy?

[Anusien]

I was just stopped from bidding on a playset of Volrath's Stronghold's this afternoon by network traffic (?). However, as soon as the auction ended the page refreshed in under a second to tell me that I was too late.

To anyone's knowledge is there a way to spam ebay packets or something as it appeared VERY fishy.
What do you mean stopped by network traffic?


So you think either A) Someone is singling you out from bidding on an item by flooding you, or B) Someone actually DDOSed EBay to win a bid on a $20 item (albeit at $6) that was priced to sell at an off-peak time?

[jazzykat]

What I am saying is that I am on a T1 connection, and when I tried to bid the bid page timed out. But when I clicked to refresh the page it came up in less than 1 second.

So was my connection slow? No. Was bringing up the page to bid slow...yes.

As to being flooded, I don't think so in that the company I work for has quite sophisticated network security.

As to what someone can do to Ebay I don't know if that is plausible either.

What I am saying is that pulling up 1 page on ebay took 30+ seconds to bid on an item, and refreshing it to see that bidding is closed is < 1 second.

Does anyone have a plausible explanation?

[Pinder]

Does anyone have a plausible explanation?

God hates you?

[Volt]

.

[xsockmonkeyx]

Chaos Theory

http://www.instantrimshot.com/

[Anusien]

What I am saying is that I am on a T1 connection, and when I tried to bid the bid page timed out. But when I clicked to refresh the page it came up in less than 1 second.

So was my connection slow? No. Was bringing up the page to bid slow...yes.

As to being flooded, I don't think so in that the company I work for has quite sophisticated network security.

As to what someone can do to Ebay I don't know if that is plausible either.

What I am saying is that pulling up 1 page on ebay took 30+ seconds to bid on an item, and refreshing it to see that bidding is closed is < 1 second.

Does anyone have a plausible explanation?
Perhaps the server was experiencing higher than normal loads in that time due to a large volume of people trying to bid. You know, since the item was closing.

I mean, paranoid much? No one would haxxxor you for $15.

[m03]

What I am saying is that pulling up 1 page on ebay took 30+ seconds to bid on an item, and refreshing it to see that bidding is closed is < 1 second.

Does anyone have a plausible explanation?

They probably load balance their servers. These are split into groups, with different groups of servers performing different functions (for instance, a group for auction pages, a group for auction bids, a group for My eBay, a group for forums, etc). You opened a link to this auction, which gave you a persistant connection to a server in the "auctions" group.

Between the time that you opened the link to this auction and the time that you attempted to submit a bid, the server that you had a persistant connection to became unavailable (crashed, someone accidently stopped the web services/daemons, someone pushed bad code during a code deployment, magic smoke escaped, etc).

The load balancer detected this behavior and marked it as being "down", so that no more requests would be directed to the server. When you refreshed the page, the load balancer took the request and forwarded it on to another server that was marked "up" in the group, and you received the requested page, albeit too late.

[jazzykat]

They probably load balance their servers. These are split into groups, with different groups of servers performing different functions (for instance, a group for auction pages, a group for auction bids, a group for My eBay, a group for forums, etc). You opened a link to this auction, which gave you a persistant connection to a server in the "auctions" group.

Between the time that you opened the link to this auction and the time that you attempted to submit a bid, the server that you had a persistant connection to became unavailable (crashed, someone accidently stopped the web services/daemons, someone pushed bad code during a code deployment, magic smoke escaped, etc).

The load balancer detected this behavior and marked it as being "down", so that no more requests would be directed to the server. When you refreshed the page, the load balancer took the request and forwarded it on to another server that was marked "up" in the group, and you received the requested page, albeit too late.

Thank you, that was the first excellent answer. I was also wondering if a bid sniping program may have some type of server magic smoke mojo.

[freakish777]

No one would haxxxor you for $15.

Totally incorrect. Just they wouldn't haxxor only you.

Hypothetically, if this was an attack on eBay, keep in mind they have, what, 1 billion auctions up at any given time? You're making a request of a server, if they're after some other item (say a Dodge Viper) and get it at half the going price...

A more realistic explanation: the packets containing your request for whatever reason hit network congestion at some intervening node on slow hardware (ie, they receive the packet, go to forward it, get back garbled information because of the network congestion, and it's just a slow/faulty system/network, taking longer to resend the packet, repeat a couple times at this intervening node before it gets the packet to it's next destination correctly). Seriously, the internet is a series of tubes, or so I hear. If you want to find out what "jumps" your packets make on the way to eBay check out the netstat or nbtstat commands. It's possible one of the machines that your packets are relayed to are pieces of shit.

[freakish777]

Thank you, that was the first excellent answer. I was also wondering if a bid sniping program may have some type of server magic smoke mojo.

Nah, they'd have to be hitting the server with requests for that page millions of times a second. Even with multiple bid sniping progams, if they make 5 requests a second to see the price, most any PC set up as a server could handle requests of that frequency.

[Ebinsugewa]

http://www.instantrimshot.com/

This is possibly the best website known to man. Thank you for englightening me.

[xsockmonkeyx]

This is possibly the best website known to man. Thank you for englightening me.

Perhaps. But keep in mind that there is A LOT of porn out there.