Webmaster's Blog

[mickeyduck]

Apologies folks, looks like we had an outage most of the day - Apache web server had crashed. I just got home from an all day steam train trip and only just found out. Sorry about that.

[Benckj]

Figured you had under control. Hopd you had a good day out.

[mickeyduck]

Bah. Apache locked up again tonight. This time I was at the Tool concert... AWesome.

[mickeyduck]

Updated the club's address details on the site tonight.

Then I decided to post up the interview someone did with our club's founder back in 1999. Now that I finally have some decent pictures to go with the text.

If you're curious about the club's beginnings or why it exists at all, have a wee read: http://mr2.org.nz/the-club/first-ade.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Personally I think anyone who ever benefited by way of gaining some technical advice from the forum, saved some money, or enjoying a bit of fun on a run, owes our founder a smile...

[mickeyduck]

Spent yesterday and the night before rejigging sites and stuff after moving my 2 servers from work to home.

It's now running on a VDSL connection with 9mbps actual upload speed so it should be just as fast as it was when it was in the server room at work.

[Curly]

Thank you Charlie. I imagine that would have been a big job.

We need to get committee to sort some reimbursement to you, probably on a monthly/annual basis.

[mickeyduck]

Thanks Pam.

Yeah I'm going to have to watch the throughput each month... Things like downloads of the BGB can impact a lot. But it's nice to know that VDSL can be upgraded to 500GB throughput a month for about $130

Which means if the club stumped up about $40 a month it'd allow the club to offer all the manuals and forum usage anyone would ever want.

That makes me no profit, it'd just be covering the cost of ensuring the club's forum can do all it can. For ten bucks a week.

Anyway until committee approves any such thing I will need to keep an eye on things cos if it goes over the allowed data cap for my plan it's either going to cost me dearly or it will slow the forum to a crawl (sorry I don't remember which, at the mo).

On the plus side, if I rock up to work one morning to find a notice on the door, the club's forum will be ok... I'll see to that don't you worry.

Gotta say though, hats off to the boss for providing hosting for the last few years. Credit where it's due eh.

[Curly]

Yes Charlie. Our club is indebted to your boss.

Thank you boss.

[mickeyduck]

Indeed.

Not that it ever actually cost him anything...

Anyway. I've spent all Easter thus far configuring server stuff here at home. I have a question for everyone.

Does the forum seem about as fast as it was a month or so ago?

And as reliable? There was an outage while I moved it but since then it's been ok eh?

Always interested to hear your thoughts folks.

And are the email notifications of topic replies still coming through?

[Barark]

i have not noticed a drop in speed, and it has still been 100% reliable.

[JasonFriday13]

I haven't noticed a drop in speed, and it's always been reliable.

[mickeyduck]

Last 2 days we had protracted and repeated power outages.

Just been down the road and bought a new UPS. Going to rehash all the power to things and ensure it's as optimal as possible.

The other thing that's annoyed me is MySQL seems to not launch properly on reboot after an outage. It is supposedly running but we get a MySQL error instead of a forum, so I need to get to the bottom of that problem too.

Anyway the forum will be offline for a bit when I rejig the power...

[mickeyduck]

OK been messing with the MySQL startup problem and if I shut down the server, it now seems to start up ok.

Fingers crossed all is well in future...

[mickeyduck]

Made a move a few days ago to shut China and Russia out of the forum as we get way too many spam bot registrations (and hacker attempts) from there. Wastes a LOT of my wife's time as she needs to check every forum registration to ensure we only activate real people with a real reason for being here.

Initially this made for a nice big drop in spam bot registrations.

Then today I found myself at war with a hacker's program trying to force its way into the admin section of our site. I found myself having to shut down access from more and more cloud servers as the thing jumped from one virtual machine to another. Every time I shut down access from one place it would jump over to another cloud service and another geographical region.

So now there's no access from any of Amazon's thousands of servers, or from GoDaddy and a raft of other places around the world.

Hopefully that doesn't affect us in a negative way and things simply stay hack free...

What a waste of a Sunday.

Here's a weeny snippet...

[Sun Jun 15 16:12:41 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:41 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:41 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:42 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:42 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:42 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:42 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:43 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:43 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:43 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:44 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:44 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:44 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:45 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:45 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:45 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:46 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:46 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:46 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:46 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:47 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:47 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:47 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:48 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:48 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:48 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:48 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:49 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:49 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:49 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:50 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:50 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:50 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:51 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:51 2014] [error] [client 37.128.146.168] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php
[Sun Jun 15 16:12:51 2014] [error] [client 203.124.98.236] client denied by server configuration: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mr2org/administrator/index.php

Requests per second went up somewhat during the attack as shown in this graph:

Screen shot 2014-06-16 at 12.53.20 AM.png (114.84 KiB) Viewed 4260 times

[frankv]

Can you perhaps only allow admin access from within NZ?