VCCA Home Forums GENERAL DISCUSSION Forum Questions Chat Slowdown?

Well, that was a tough one. I'm sorry for the lockup that we experienced yesterday. Among other things, I was unaware of it for the first three hours. I was actually programming a new REGION ROSTER feature and wasn't checking my email.

Now -- here's the problem. In a nutshell we were bombarded by bots and spammers from Thailand and the Philippines. They overwhelmed the server and it shut down. Once I dicovered this, we rebooted and it came back up okay.

In the almost three hour analysis that followed, I finally discovered that a major file was missing from our server. It's the one that lists the IP addressess of the bad guys. And then it prevents them from accessing our server. It contains the addresses of a few thousand addresses that are automatically blocked.

I have reinstalled that file and it appears that we might be secure again. But -- I don't know for sure if that was the single root cause or not. We'll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, another server administrator who had recommended that we move to a new host, backed off when I gave him the details of our "attack". He said that this probably would have taken their server down too.

So we march on.

I was unable to connect to chat this morning again, 6.00 am AEDST. I did the standard windows connection check , and came back with the server is on line but not accepting connections.

Okay... just spent the past 6 hours working on a new solution. Installed it 5 minutes ago and it appears to be working.

Please let me know if you experience any further issues over the next few days.

Email: webmaster@vcca.org

Thanks!!

Members -- read the latest H-E-R-E

Bill, thanks for fighting the good fight!

Dean

For me, Chevy Chatter was down for about three hours this afternoon. After checking all of the errors posted by Billy Boy Barker and seeing the excessive theft of our bandwidth, that pretty much explains why Chevy Chatter has so much down time. However, why don't the other popular car sites and talk sites have the same issues with the excessive theft of bandwidth like we do? Seems like the bad dudes are only attacking our site for some reason.

I'm going to post most of my comments in the Members area. I don't want to publicize what the current actions are.

Sounds good!

Chatter works with lightning speed now !!, after not being able to get on at all this morning.

good.... I just made a break-through on a couple of things.

And I have blocked a couple of "good guys".... see member area for more info. :-)

From about 7:13 AM PDT until 9:15 AM PDT this morning I was unable to access Chevy Chatter.

I see in the log files that 14 other people were using Chat online during that time.

I'm checking further.....

I tried to get on Chevy Chatter at least six times within that two hour period and it was a no-go each time. I could go to other talk sites, other web sites but not Chevy Chatter.

I made a post on Chevy Chatter at 7:11 AM and then I clicked on "submit". From that time on and for the next two hours I was unable to access Chevy Chatter. Tried on another computer and it was the same there as well.

Looks like we've had pretty good performance since Sunday afternoon. I'm adding 3 or 4 IP's a day to the banned list. been watching the log files real close.

Next slowdown will probably occur Sunday morning at 3 am PDT (USA West Coast). That's when the backup kicks in. I'll be watching this time.



--Bill

I just logged in and it took about 3 minutes to connect and a couple more to log in. 6:32 pm to 6:38 eastern time.

The error and activity logs show someone logged in every minute for the hour before and after that. So, it "appears" that it was working.

But -- I also see about a thousand errors every 1 to 2 seconds looking for a non-existent file. Weird. Also... there was ONE bot trying to get in during this time. From Redmond Washington.

So... I'm more confused that before I began. but... I'll keep looking. At least it's working now.

I had trouble getting in to VCCA earlier, but all seems fine now.

Yes, I was actually "riding" the system earlier today when it crashed. There's even a possibility that I may have caused it but we aren't sure.

I was unable to restart it so I opened a trouble ticket. It took them 2 or 3 hours to fix it too. We still don't know WHAT caused it since the log files don't show any errors...

I'll be digging into them for the next hour or so...

Darn. This would have made 6 days in a row without any issues.

Also I am unable to view the links posted that oldie has viewed. I either get an error has occurred or no sound. Just need to know if it's on my end or not. Certainly appreciate the help.

I can see them...

Try this link:

https://vccachat.org/ubbthreads.php/ubb/userposts/id/34

Ya, I think that would have been some kind of a world record for the site.

Anyway, I was not able to access the site from 1:30 PM PDT today until later this evening.

My error. I can view the links, its just that once I follow them I have no sound and/or an error message. It's probably just a setting on my end. I'm sure you have enough to do battling the "gremlins".

Amazing... I was ready for last night's backup slowdown... and it didn't happen!!!

In anticipation of the usual Sunday 3 am slowdown (during the weekly backups), I set up a special program and tracked PINGS to the VCCA server every FOUR MINUTES all night long.

I stayed up until 1 am watching the service .... There was no problems... So I started the AUTO PING program. At 9 am I checked the log listing, and EVERY SINGLE PING was successfull -- every four minutes all night long. Ha!

Oh, well.... maybe next time.

Oh, yes... I did add another 3 addresses yesterday to our banned list. It does seem to be working.

--bb

Thank you for all your work on this!

Good morning Bill
I've logged in several times this morning and every time I go to the Chat, the system logs me out and I an unable to post a topic for discussion. pottejo