Webmaster's Blog

[mknz]

The DB will now restart if it crashes at worst after 5 minutes. I think this is an alright mitigation strategy. If the DB falls over everything will 5XX for a bit until they back off and then it should start up again after they've buggered off. My only concern is if something is writing to DB and it corrupts. It's a low likelihood since I doubt anyone will get served while it's being hammered and the forum software is smart enough to use in-memory locks for writing. Worst case we lose a day of forum activity, which isn't great but isn't that bad either.

[ClanFever]

Best to lose a days worth than a lifes worth, I understand if hourly backups aren't cost effective enough. Good job finding and blocking the worst of the crawlers

[mknz]

Best to lose a days worth than a lifes worth, I understand if hourly backups aren't cost effective enough. Good job finding and blocking the worst of the crawlers

We've got rolling 1-hour backups since the DB is tiny. There's a disk image at the infrastructure level once every 24 hours.

[mknz]

Changed signup to reCAPTCHA (forum update supports v2) + basic riddle and auto-activate on email confirmation. This should mean more people can start using the forum instantly. Still have to manually add them to the right events group though.

[Crawls]

Would recapture stop bots from roaming the forum?

[mknz]

Would recapture stop bots from roaming the forum?

Nah, that's just for forum signup. We have a setup that allows Google, Bing, and a few others to index the site and forum.

[mknz]

Ugh, really another time the DB fell over. It should have rebooted. Let me check the logs

[mknz]

Return of aspiegelbot. I'll try another method of blocking them. Really stupid to write such a hammering bot if you're not going to get anything because it's full of 5XX probably coded by some intern. No, that's unfair, interns have done better than this

[mknz]

Apologies for the disrupted service. I had to get very aggressive and IP range block all of 114.119.0.0/16

I wish I didn't have to, but they left me no choice

[*84vvt]

Thank you for your time on this
Most greatly appreciated .

[Benckj]

Good to see your working behind the scenes to keep forum alive. Well appreciated.

[mknz]

So got SSL/TLS cert sussed on the email webapp, fixed SPF, did some other things to help avoid the forum emails from getting filtered. Just waiting on openhost to see if I can't get some other things fixed (mainly I can't set the actual mail server's cert using the plesk nor their own UI).

[mknz]

Well no go, but can provide the real domain name for the email server and there's a cert on that

[mknz]

There's a bug in the latest version of the forum software that prevents us from being able to delete private messages. It's due to be fixed in the next update. If anyone is running out of space send me a message

[mknz]

The AWS free first 12-months is up and just waiting on our order for a reserved instance (server) to be fulfilled. Paying upfront saves us quite a bit of cash. There'll be a 5-minute downtime while switching