Site hiccups Dec 27-30 2011

[Bob Hubbard]

We're seeing some unusual traffic spikes causing some service interruption. I'm working with the data center to figure out how to best deal with them. My apologies on the inconvenience, hopefully we'll have it worked out shortly.

[Bob Hubbard]

MartialTalk is currently being hit with a Denial of Services Attack. We're working on the issue and will have the "nice people from China" who are doing it blocked and service restored. We apologize for the inconvenience.

[jks9199]

Really? They wanna mess with a site full of martial artists? "You have insulted the honor of the House of Martial Talk!"

[Bob Hubbard]

I don't think we could beat up the Chinese. We may just be a wee bit outnumbered, and my last name ain't Custer. :D

[dubljay]

I don't think we could beat up the Chinese. We may just be a wee bit outnumbered, and my last name ain't Custer. :D


No kidding there. Not a battle I'd rush into head first without careful consideration.

[Bob Hubbard]

Issues appear to have been caused by site-scraper bots run out of China attempting to clone the site. This caused the server to be over loaded and crash hard. The hard crash caused corruption in a couple of tables in the database, requiring a full lock down and a few hours to repair. I had the data center do some additional performance tuning and optimizations in the mean time.

We should be good to go, though there may be 1-2 more brief interruptions today as we will be upgrading Apache and PHP servers late morning-early afternoon.

I apologize for the interruption and inconvenience.

[MA-Caver]

We should be good to go, though there may be 1-2 more brief interruptions today as we will be upgrading Apache and PHP servers late morning-early afternoon.



Are they AH-64 Apache's?? :uhyeah: They'll provide a fine wall of protection won't they... heh.

Hope that things will go okay for the rest of the year. Glad that it wasn't days worth of repairs, just hours. You guys are doing a great job maintaining the site and quick to jump on any fires that might sprout up. It's very appreciated!

[Bob Hubbard]

I need caffeine, stat! :)

[oftheherd1]

MartialTalk is currently being hit with a Denial of Services Attack. We're working on the issue and will have the "nice people from China" who are doing it blocked and service restored. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Thanks for your hard work and dedication.

[Steve]

Good job, bob! We want you on that firewall. We NEED you on that firewall.


Sent using Tapatalk. Please ignore typos.

[Bob Hubbard]

I'd planned on going to be early last night, by 11pm. Ended up crawling into bed at 4am. Left the rest of the database rebuild to the admin at the data center. Crawled out at 9am, probably catching a short nap again around 1ish. So far things look to be smooth, we didn't lose any data (the search indexes were the worst of the lot, easily rebuilt, just takes time to reindex the almost 2 million posts here).

I'm getting too old for this....36 hr days are for the young. LOL.

[MA-Caver]

Wish there was something I/we can do to help. I'm planning to definitely renew when I get working again.

[jks9199]

Wish there was something I/we can do to help. I'm planning to definitely renew when I get working again.

Not picking on Caver with this -- but an annual membership is about $22 US. That's still less than $2 a month. A Lifetime Membership is about 5 years worth of annual Supporting Memberships, just over $10 a month for a year. Either is rather affordable. But even if you can't do a paid subscription -- click through to some of the advertisers now and then. And buy from them when you can and when they fit your needs...