What's up with all the downtime lately?

Post by **wardrich** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 4:03 pm

The site was down again for a solid part of the early morning today.

Post by **emmzee** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 5:26 pm

Yea, I don't really know. For some reason, occasionally the "FROM_INTERNET" spikes and stays there until the server cries uncle. I'm not sure why this seems to happen, but rebooting always solves the problem. Here's the bandwidth usage chart:

<img src="http://www.dosgames.com/rtg_img.png">

Guess where the problem occurred?

I don't have time at the moment to do a real investigation at the moment. I've tried various things to stop this from happening but nothing seems to make any difference. I'm running a firewall on the box and my host also runs their own firewall. I'm also running bfd, mod_security, dos-deflate ... *shrugs*

If anyone has suggestions I'd be glad to hear 'em ... I may not be around much next week 'cuz I'll be at a conference in BC, but I'll try to check as often as possible in case the server is down.

Post by **Dogbreath** » Sun Jul 22, 2007 8:55 am

Damn, I knew I shouldn't have showed 'Hyde how to use that IP bomber...

Ro@m · Post by **Ro@m** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 3:30 pm

You got the point there,but maybe it wa tinman for locking his threads.

Anyway hasn't this used to happen before?

Post by **Larry Laffer** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 4:08 pm

Question: Am I the only one around here that gets a download dialog for index.php, when the server acts funny?(that is, unless I get that fancy "Error connecting to database" error ::) )

Post by **emmzee** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 4:51 pm

The problem on the old server was basically that it was just constantly overloaded. It wasn't powerful enough to handle the load, and the server load was up around 10-15 ... ALL the time. (It should be, like, 1.) So eventually it would just plain give up. The problem here ... I dunno what the problem is, really. If it were an attack of some sort, the problem wouldn't be fixed by simply rebooting.

I'm going to look around for an inexpensive managed hosting solution (the current server is unmanaged) to hopefully avoid these kinda issues. My current host charges $100/hr to troubleshoot problems outside of the usual tech support issues, and they may not even be able to do anything in this case anyways. I know a little about running a server but it's beyond my skillz to troubleshoot a problem like this, especially since I can't access the server when the problem is occurring to see what's happening!

Post by **dosraider** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 6:13 pm

Was approx the same day / time last time, I thought.
Weird.

Pancake · Post by **Pancake** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 6:53 pm

Dogbreath wrote:Damn, I knew I shouldn't have showed 'Hyde how to use that IP bomber...

...

Actually, the shareware version only lets you ping 10 numbers at a time; not enough to hax someone's internet. I looked on various w4r3z sites for the registered version but with no luck. :'( Is it worth shelling out that $15?

Post by **emmzee** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 7:00 pm

Somewhat amusingly, when the server goes down the only thing that still responds is PING ... which means that I'm not notified that the server is down, because, yes, it still responds to being pinged.

Post by **emmzee** » Sun Jul 29, 2007 11:07 pm

It's ...
<i>Mega double post time!
Mega double post time!</i>
{sung to the tune of "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=areyUfCNFxY">Peanut butter jelly time</a>"}
{sung to the tune of "<a href="http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=hMenB9Ywh2Q">Another bites the dust</a>"}"

Ahem.

After the server went down for a second time today, I sent a longer, angrier ticket to ThePlanet's support, and got this reply:

ThePlanet wrote:William . - Sunday July 29th, 2007; 10:37 PM CDT
Per this ticket, 4170139PLNT, customer is describing an inbound attack on the server.
We will be escalating this ticket for further assistance.
-Support.

Jacob B. - Sunday July 29th, 2007; 10:43 PM CDT
I have placed this server under Cisco Guard protection. We will monitor for attack traffic and update every 12 hours.

So we'll see what happens, if anything.

--edited song to make it fit the tune better.

(wardrich)
--Added Queen, much better song.

(~dosraider)
--Added this line because I had nothing better to do. (wardrich)

Post by **dosraider** » Mon Jul 30, 2007 3:22 pm

Whilst we're in musical mood : Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Relax

It feels kinda good, isn't it?
Being under Cisco Guard umbrella.
I'm relax now.