LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 1:27 am Post subject: DOS attack

Sorry about the outage for the past 12 or so hours.

In short, we were DOSed by Yandex.ru 's search spiders. Because we're on a shared server, the 200+ connections from them scraping the site got the attention of our server-mates, who called in a ticket on performance. The technical staff tried to contact me via email but before I could respond (I was in the middle of my 2 hour Friday night internet radio performance), they locked our viewtopic.php for us. And then opened a ticket for us in someone else's ticket queue.

By the time I got it it, and got ahold of FT, and we figured out what was going on, we got bumped into some kind of server admin ticket queue hell, and then all the techs went home.

Anyway one of the night techs called me this morning my time, we talked through what happened, he looked at our logs and agreed with us about the problem and the solution (he'd like us to domain ban them too), and we got our php file back so the forums run again.

Not much I can do about this except spend more money on a dedicated host, which I don't think is appropriate given our current traffic level. Anyway, we're back online.

Thanks to FT for toughing it out with Lunarpages last night.

Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 7:11 am Post subject:

Big thanks to all the admin staff for keeping this place going with so little downtime throughout the years. No matter how long I'm gone, I can always count on the forums being here when I need you guys. Smile

Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 8:42 am Post subject:

" and then all the techs went home. "

Nice.

Glad though that you got it figured out and back online tho!

Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 9:50 am Post subject: Re: DOS attack

EdisonRex wrote:
(he'd like us to domain ban them too)

I suggest banning that whole supernatural registrant (.ru)

"Mr. Kruschev said we will bury you
I don't subscribe to this point of view."

Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 10:31 am Post subject:

I blocked all of China and Russia's IPs on my dedicated server. I saw a 95% drop in hack attempts after doing so.

Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 12:20 pm Post subject:

gregw wrote:
I blocked all of China and Russia's IPs on my dedicated server. I saw a 95% drop in hack attempts after doing so.

Generally we already do, and have. One of my little, now more urgent projects is to migrate the phpBB banlist up to the Apache level. It's not a dedicated server here, so I don't get that much access. But it looks more like a DOS when it is Apache showing the load and not phpBB.

Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 2:04 pm Post subject: Re: DOS attack

EdisonRex wrote:
Sorry about the outage for the past 12 or so hours.

No biggie.

Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 3:08 pm Post subject:

my heros! many thanks for keeping us safe from the bad guys.
- seriously.