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By Stephen Shankland, 23 March 2006 08:15

NEWS

Sun Microsystems' Grid, a publicly available computing service, was hit by a denial of service network attack on its inaugural day, the company said on Wednesday.

To let people try out the Sun Grid, the company made a text-to-speech translation service publicly accessible for, for example, turning blog entries into podcasts. Aisling MacRunnels, Sun's senior director of utility computing, said in an interview on Wednesday: "It became the focus of a denial of service attack."

In denial of service attacks, numerous computers - often groups of compromised PCs called botnets - simultaneously attack a target on the network. In this case, the attack took down the text-to-speech service.

Dealing with the issue was relatively easy: Sun moved the service to be within the regular Sun Grid, which requires authorisation to use. MacRunnels said: "We had to defend against a bunch. There were too many coming against us, so we moved it inside."

The attacks didn't disturb the regular grid, Sun said. A spokesman said: "There was no degradation to performance for users inside the Sun Grid."

The Sun Grid is one of several visionary ideas the company hopes will restore status and revenue that tapered away after the dot-com bubble burst and its own hardware and software lost much of its cachet.

The Sun Grid authorisation process requires a person to agree to legal terms and export control terms, and users must share their addresses. Payment requires PayPal or another Sun-approved mechanism, and PayPal users must be verified, MacRunnels added.

MacRunnels said: "That gives us a level of knowledge about the user. They have to have a bank account on file with PayPal and a home address. Those make us feel more comfortable."

That position dovetails with one long held by Sun chief executive Scott McNealy. "Absolute anonymity breeds irresponsibility," he said in a 2003 interview. "Audit trails and authentication provide a much more civil society."

Stephen Shankland writes for CNET News.com