If you really wanted a new IP address you could create a new Linode, copy your disk image over from your current Linode then delete your current Linode.

Thanks, but I've paid in advance for this linode so that isn't an option. Or am I mistaken about that?

Edit: Yes exactly Right now I've moved all of my vhosts to another linode and am just monitoring. The thing that sucks is in my opinion the linode is unusable...

It's a 1.5Mbps attack, if you're dropping the traffic it would have absolutely no impact on your Linode except to accrue roughly $48/mth worth of bandwidth usage, which isn't terribly much, all things considered.

I'm curious, why did this attack make the node "unusable"?

At the time of my writing it was 1.5Mb/s but it was as high as 7Mb/s. Yes I was dropping it, but that was also eating up CPU cycles of which I saw as much at 15%. All of that is right off of the top of the linode (L768).

Would you mind explaining your comment a bit more (or point me in the right direction) about how it would improve Linode's ratios?

OK, but 15% of 1 core is nothing. Even 15% of your overall CPU power of 4 cores -- i.e. 60% of 1 core -- shouldn't cause problems. (Well, at 60% I'd start worrying about the networking stack a bit, especially if the packets go through conntrack.)

It was largely a joke. Settlement-free peering agreements between ISPs -- when they connect each others' networks for no money -- often place great importance on their traffic ratios, requiring that they exchange a relatively equal amount of traffic. Linode is probably pretty unequal, since a lot of their traffic is probably web stuff, which tends to use more outbound traffic. (HTTP request: 1-2 KB. Response: Anything, but frequently hundreds of KB.)

There's a difference between "don't want to use because the packets don't sit right with me" and "the linode is unusable". Let's be clear, the linode is perfectly usable (for anything but DNS serving). If I said "I don't want to use my linode because it's a full moon and also a Tuesday", that doesn't somehow make my linode unusable (unless it's a werelinode, but that's another issue). It just means that I haven't restocked on silver USB keys recently.

I guess I'm (incorrectly?) hung up on the fact that regardless what the numbers are legitimate traffic would be competing with this DNS noise and that just doesn't sit right with me.

Basically, you don't pay for inbound traffic, so if you just drop the inbound DNS traffic, there is no impact on your linode. You've got four cores to play with (so effectively 400%), so 15% usage isn't a problem unless you're maxing out all four cores. The only scenario where you might see some impact is if you're trying to run a DNS server, but there's not really any reason why you would since Linode provides free DNS servers both for resolution and hosting.

but I followed that I'm not going to use a machine for business purposes while it's under attack thereby making it unusable to me.