Unusually High traffic from Akamai/Oracle - public-yum.oracle.com

[James Stahr <stahr () mailbag com>]

Hi,

Since I'm not a customer of either organization, I'm reaching out to 
NANOG for a contact and perhaps others may also be experiencing similar 
symptoms over the past 3-4 weeks.  The situation appears to be that 
customers of ours have Oracle Linux and when they attempt to download 
updates, their traffic goes through the roof for hours on end.  While 
researching this phenomenon, I found this discussion which coincides 
with the traffic I've seen, however there is no mention of excessive 
traffic resulting from this "corruption" nor have their been any 
additional reports:

https://community.oracle.com/thread/4138810


Currently, I have two customer environments which are hitting about 
~2Gb/s when normally their traffic levels are nearly zero.   At first I 
thought it was an isolated incident but then we observed the same issue 
with another customer.  All of this traffic is coming from 
23.35.204.188:80, which belongs to Akamai.  Since that's somewhat of a 
dead end, we examined the hosts which are requesting the data from 
Akamai and found that they are all Oracle Linux boxes and it's a yum 
process on Oracle Linux which appears to be repeatedly downloading the 
same content for hours on end:


[root@xyzzy noc]# netstat -plutan | grep :80
tcp        0      0 172.16.122.112:14272        23.35.204.188:80         
   ESTABLISHED 58880/python
[root@xyzzy noc]# ps auxww | grep python
root     41015  0.0  0.3 401940 52044 ?        S    Apr30   0:02 
/usr/bin/python2 /usr/share/system-config-lvm/system-config-lvm.py
root     58880 59.7  1.0 479680 164140 ?       R    18:24  27:18 
/usr/bin/python /usr/share/PackageKit/helpers/yum/yumBackend.py 
get-updates none

I can only assume that the data being downloaded is corrupt as this 
multiple hour download does not consume any disk space and because the 
file(s) are repeatedly downloaded, the logic behind the yum routines are 
also at fault for 1TB of

I don't expect anyone at Akamai to reach out to me since they are simply 
the middle man here, but I'm hoping that someone at Oracle will because 
the cost to Oracle for Akamai to deliver this junk traffic is not zero 
and I have a hard time seeing how this issue is isolated to our network. 
 I'd also be interested to hear from anyone else who has been seeing 
traffic spikes from public-yum.oracle.com.


-James Stahr