Post: #1

Essentially I'm clueless!

I checked the forum last night when I got home at around 9:00 PM and everything was fine. I didn't check it again before crashing for the night but woke up this morning to an email from DrChocolate saying the forum had been down for awhile.

I checked a couple of other sites on the server and all were down and I was unable to log in to the server control panel, so I rebooted the server which didn't help. I then re-initialized the Smart Layer, which is sort of a bridge between the server and the Datacenter and that didn't seem to help either. At that point there wasn't anything more I could do so I called support at the Datacenter. They couldn't login to the server either and started digging around to see what the problem could be, but before we really even got started the server started responding again and all sites came back online.

Once the server was back up and running I started looking through the logs to see if I could find what caused the issue. My first thought was that it could have been a DDoS attack, but if that were the case the server should have gone down again shortly after coming back online, and the logs didn't show anything that would reflect it to be an attack, and I didn't find anything else in the logs that looked to be unusual either.

So what caused the forum to go down? Like I said I'm clueless and I'm just going to chalk it up to Gremlins.

I'm sorry for any inconvenience this caused anyone.

Post: #2

Thanks. I was getting SQL DB error 1040, too many connections, earlier yesterday.

Post: #3

(10-08-2017 10:53 AM)BigDickBandit420 Wrote:  Thanks. I was getting SQL DB error 1040, too many connections, earlier yesterday.

That does suggest an attack, but the logs don't show anything to unusual. We did have a spike in traffic yesterday of about 33%, but that shouldn't have been enough to trigger a "too many connections" error.

Edit: I just got a bunch of email notifications in from the server that were apparently generated as the server was going down and therefore didn't get sent, indicating that service after service had been shut down because the server was out of memory, and mySQL was among those shut down, as well as Apache which is actually the Web Server.

Now I just have to figure out what was eating up all of the memory.

Post: #4

Does anything ever happen to theses attackers?

Post: #5

(10-08-2017 7:02 PM)DarkLord1 Wrote:  Does anything ever happen to theses attackers?

Not likely, but this time it was not any sort of attack.

Post: #6

Glad to have it up again Mark. You really are doing an awesome job. I used to run a website taht wasn't that big of a deal but i had 200 members. a few people kept on rubbing me the wrong way so I just kicked them out. I got a ddos attack and instead of dealing with it, i just shut the website down. I was in highschool so maybe was just annoyed because it wasn't a fulfilling hobby or something lol. I know it's not a DDOS attack but seeing so many people getting kicked (and rightfully so) do you have a backup plan if so?

Since I got back i keep on visiting this site atleast 2 times a day and linger for a long time reading experiences and learning even more. i hope it doesn't go down because we all know how some people are jealous of how successful you have been in maintaining pherotruth for so many years

Post: #7

I'm not really sure what you mean by so many people getting kicked or a backup plan, but we haven't really banned that many people and a good number of the ones that were banned had tried coming back under different usernames only to get banned again.

As to a backup plan, We do have CloudFlare, which doesn't seem to be as effective as it once was, a hardware firewall and a daily Cloud Backup service, so if somehow the database were to become compromised or corrupted again the most we would lose would be one days worth of posts.

Post: #8

Ah my bad lol. You're right, I thought you were banning people everyday due to me seeing a member or two who recently signed up getting a red cross on their name. I didn't bother to see it was only one person all along and dates didn't change

Post: #9

Of the last 2 people to get banned, the first was a fifth or sixth time reincarnation of Mr. E. and the other was michaeltheman being banned for the third time in 9 days.

Post: #10

Wow, Mr. E just won't give up.