Downtime info - no data lost, all is restored

[Michael Wechsler]

Yesterday we encountered a long period of downtime. The main front end server went down as a result of hard drive corruption, including a raid drive, that proved far too difficult to repair. Some of this may be the result of a mass number of hacking attempts that originated in China. I had reported on this earlier, which included taking measure to ban the entire country as well as several others in the region. The server reacts more slowly having to deal with these attacks but at least its safer.

While that front end server is still temporarily down and needs to be restored, I'm at least glad to report that all the existing data remains secure and nothing was lost either. There may be a handful of anomalies as a result of my updating all existing software to latest versions. This is the best we can do to prevent any of these attempts from being successful.

Thanks for your patience, support and understanding. My sincerest apologies for the inconvenience.

 

[cbg]

Just glad to be back online!

 

[army judge]

Professor, I suspected as much. Thanks for the update. Your approach seems sound, I hope it works.

It may be time to require all new posters be registered users, too, as well as disallowing any new members to not post links for 90 days. It is a continual battle against spammers and those who seek subvert your advertising ban. Food for thought, enjoy your Sunday, sir.

 

[Michael Wechsler]

We are still having some problems with posting - they do appear but the cursor is spinning and the page doesn't seem to complete the load. I'm working on it...

 

[Michael Wechsler]

It may be time to require all new posters be registered users, too, as well as disallowing any new members to not post links for 90 days. It is a continual battle against spammers and those who seek subvert your advertising ban. Food for thought, enjoy your Sunday, sir.

Email issue temporarily resolved, thankfully. It's not the perfect solution but it works.

Regarding the spammers... yes, great suggestion... it has gotten way out of hand. As I mentioned, we should be moving to a whole new system soon. My hesitation was to wait to make sure that it was the right step but, in the meanwhile, we may need to be more diligent. This might amaze you but a friend and colleague owns a popular forum for musicians. He gets in excess of 10,000 attempts at spam registrations per week. I think last time I heard it was 15,000!!! Many of these originate in China, Russia, Vietnam, Ukraine and to a lesser extent, India (mostly spam and not rapid fire robots).

 

[army judge]

Email issue temporarily resolved, thankfully. It's not the perfect solution but it works.

Regarding the spammers... yes, great suggestion... it has gotten way out of hand. As I mentioned, we should be moving to a whole new system soon. My hesitation was to wait to make sure that it was the right step but, in the meanwhile, we may need to be more diligent. This might amaze you but a friend and colleague owns a popular forum for musicians. He gets in excess of 10,000 attempts at spam registrations per week. I think last time I heard it was 15,000!!! Many of these originate in China, Russia, Vietnam, Ukraine and to a lesser extent, India (mostly spam and not rapid fire robots).

Wow, I knew they were persistent and pervasive, I didn't know to what extent. I can only imagine what a major newspaper, gossip site, or political discussion site gets.

No matter what, I enjoy our little slice of Cyberland. So, you lead, we'll follow.

 

[army judge]

Watch this, professor:

If I post once, the system duplicates the post, and posts two.

/-\/-\

.

 

[Betty3]

LOL

I can post replies sometimes & sometimes I can't - sometimes I get a website server error/problems with web page ====maybe it will all be ok later.

 

[Michael Wechsler]

army judge - yes, am also seeing the occasional double post. We should have this all sorted out by tomorrow night, latest.

Betty3 - Let me know what browser you're using and what specific error you're receiving. I have no problems at all with posting right now. Earlier in the day there was an issue which I identified and fixed with pages hanging. If there is a specific problem, just post it.

Thanks everyone for your help and patience! Hope you're enjoying the summer.

 

[Betty3]

thelawprofessor, the last 3 I posted I had no problem - hopefully everything is ok. If I have a problem, I will post it. (This one makes 4 w/o a problem.)

 

[Michael Wechsler]

We've been able to restore the front end server. Tomorrow night we should have everything back online and even better configured than before. Thanks for your patience and look forward to having everything fully operational and all issues (including email notification) completely back.

 

[Betty3]

Yay!.......Thank you.