World-Record Distributed Chess Project
Carlos Justiniano · Linux journal · 2004
Interest in the event was significantly greater than anticipated. As a result, a large number of PeerNodes descended on the SuperNode in a situation that resembled a denial-of-service attack. To address this potentially fatal situation, ChessBrain member Gavin Roy tweaked /proc filesystem entries to modify the TCP/IP stack's behavior. We also stopped the SuperNode from Denmark and modified the SuperNode source code to instruct remote PeerNodes to change the frequency of their connection attempts. We were able to address the situation in real time without rebooting a single machine.