Paciolan

In case you haven’t heard, the Rockies are going to the world series after winning 20 of their last 21 games and sweeping both the Phillies and the Diamondbacks in the divisional playoffs.

To help makes things for the thousands of fans wanting tickets, the Colorado Rockies decided to only sell tickets online. Fair enough.

Well on Monday, millions of people attempted to buy tickets to the World Series at Coors Field. I was one of them. Using my tablet in the middle of Digital Logic, I was going to try and snag a couple of Rockpile tickets (Rockpile Tickets to the World Series: $65/each). Well, I sat there for about 10 minutes, a battle waged against server timeouts. I finally gave up.

The story reported later that night went something like this:
From colorado.rockies.mlb.com:

This morning, after more than 8.5 million hits on the Colorado Rockies website, Paciolan (Pack-ee-o-lan), Major League Baseball’s ticket vendor, experienced a system wide outage that impacted all of its North American customers. As a result, the Colorado Rockies have suspended the sale of 2007 World Series tickets scheduled to be played at Coors Field.

By this morning, the report had changed a bit. “System wide outage” turned into “external malicious attack” and eventually the Paciolan/MLB was playing the role of victim to a denial-of-service attack.

Yea, DOS my ass. Drew calls BS on this one and I have to agree with him:

From www.thedenverchannel.com:

Drew Curtis, the owner of Fark.com, called the denial of service claim “bogus.” Curtis, who has been on the receiving end of DOS attacks, told TheDenverChannel, “If they notified their upstream provider that they were under attack, the upstream provider could have shut that off in no time flat. They’re lying.”

Curtis said the heavy traffic Monday was likely coming from ticket brokers.

“Scalping is big money, big enough for scammers to develop utilities to open thousands of simultaneous connections attempting to buy tickets. I suspect that was at least part of the problem.”

Confident they’ve beefed up their network enough blocked the culprits, Rockies tickets went back on sale today at noon local time, kind of. I got on a campus computer¹ at 11:45am and was online trying to get tickets until 1pm, when I had to leave for a meeting.

I spent wasted over an hour of time either looking at a 120 second countdown timer assuring me that the systems were under severe loads and I would be ushered in in the order I arrive or this screen:

That screen, my friends, is a server timeout screen. In short, I was blocked again. Rocktober has frozen into Mocktober.

I looked for a report on a local news site saying that ticket sales would be suspended again because gremlins had been mucking around in the systems again; no such luck.

Tickets were selling, apparently. But at the appalling rate of 1500 per a minute.

So here’s what I don’t get. Pick any A-list music performer (U2, Dave Matthews Band, The Police, etc). Most of those performances sellout within minutes, like eight minutes. 60,000 tickets gone in a flash at a rate five times faster then Rockies were selling tickets. How come they never have any issues?

Let the scalping begin!

For more information on the squirrel with big nuts: http://www.fark.com/farq/about.shtml

¹We sit on the FRGP Network, which, for the sake of this post, well call A Really Fast Connection™