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So what exactly happened?

gmcunni

Active member
Joined
Feb 25, 2007
Messages
11,500
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Location
CO Front Range
I've since replaced the image and they now get this. That's the most annoying image I could find. :lol:

that was the most annoying thing you could find? i see a new thread starting :)

should have went with this one ( sorry B)
dumper_air1.jpg
 

dmc

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Oct 28, 2004
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14,275
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0
what site had the smile hot linked?

I propose a massive cyber attack!

A bunch of my Phish friends on another message board actually did that one time on a Salt Water Fishing message board. Was pretty hilarious. Inundated their forum with Phish discussion. :lol:

I did a DOS from home and took out Linda Tripps website using automated and manual methods.. I even told her webmaster I was doing it... Wasn't illegal then... Wonder if it is now?
Basically rendered the site unusable during the height of the Monica Lewinsky thing..
Coolest thing i did was create a windows script that create giant size posts from different proxies and filled up the directory and everything shut down..

It was awesome...
After i was done - i explain it all to the webmaster and how to avoid it.. He was cool.. She was not... :)
 

drjeff

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 18, 2006
Messages
19,183
Points
113
Location
Brooklyn, CT
I still don't think it's responding fast enough. Hopefully we can limp through the day. I still plan to move to a dedicated server over the weekend. It was a unique combination of things it seems. Here's the basic rundown:
  1. Normal seasonal traffic increase. We're right at the limit of the semi-dedicated server we're on so the site is inherently a bit "sensitive" already. Many of you might remember early season issues in the past as traffic starts to ramp up. Traffic is significantly less in the off-season.
  2. I discovered some other sites where AZ smiles are being hotlinked. I'm still working with these forum admins to get them removed. One site is very high traffic and it's my guess that someone hotlinked the smile into their sig so each time one of their posts is called, it hits the AZ server to retrieve the image. I've since replaced the image and they now get this. That's the most annoying image I could find. :lol: Hopefully, that will encourage them to remove it. Once I've confirmed they have, I'll be enabling hotlink protection so this doesn't happen again.
  3. A script I was using called vbSEO. It's a search engine optimization script that does a number of things including prettying up the forum URLs. You might notice those are gone as I disabled the script since it is a resource hog anyway, and really eats server resources when hotlinking is involved. I might take a bit of a hit in terms of search engine referrals until all the forum URLs are reindexed, but it had to be done.
  4. During all the various efforts in troubleshooting this, I managed to break a lot of things along the way. :oops: .htaccess files across several subdomains can be a real bitch to manage. I still have to fix the news portal home page, but everything else seems to be working. Please contact me if you see anything screwed up.
Well, that's about it. Sorry it's not more entertaining like an anti-AZ DOS conspiracy or something...

Anyway, sorry for the downtime, and I can't promise the site won't drop again, but I hope by the end of the weekend, we'll be flying right along on our own server.

Thanks for the effort Greg. May a nice long line of seeded bumps be in your not to distant future for your efforts and issues the past day or so (and not all of them were just on AZ)
 

mikestaple

Member
Joined
Oct 28, 2008
Messages
286
Points
16
Location
Duxbury, MA
I still don't think it's responding fast enough. Hopefully we can limp through the day. I still plan to move to a dedicated server over the weekend. It was a unique combination of things it seems. Here's the basic rundown:
  1. Normal seasonal traffic increase. We're right at the limit of the semi-dedicated server we're on so the site is inherently a bit "sensitive" already. Many of you might remember early season issues in the past as traffic starts to ramp up. Traffic is significantly less in the off-season.
  2. I discovered some other sites where AZ smiles are being hotlinked. I'm still working with these forum admins to get them removed. One site is very high traffic and it's my guess that someone hotlinked the smile into their sig so each time one of their posts is called, it hits the AZ server to retrieve the image. I've since replaced the image and they now get this. That's the most annoying image I could find. :lol: Hopefully, that will encourage them to remove it. Once I've confirmed they have, I'll be enabling hotlink protection so this doesn't happen again.
  3. A script I was using called vbSEO. It's a search engine optimization script that does a number of things including prettying up the forum URLs. You might notice those are gone as I disabled the script since it is a resource hog anyway, and really eats server resources when hotlinking is involved. I might take a bit of a hit in terms of search engine referrals until all the forum URLs are reindexed, but it had to be done.
  4. During all the various efforts in troubleshooting this, I managed to break a lot of things along the way. :oops: .htaccess files across several subdomains can be a real bitch to manage. I still have to fix the news portal home page, but everything else seems to be working. Please contact me if you see anything screwed up.
Well, that's about it. Sorry it's not more entertaining like an anti-AZ DOS conspiracy or something...

Anyway, sorry for the downtime, and I can't promise the site won't drop again, but I hope by the end of the weekend, we'll be flying right along on our own server.

Thank you Greg. I manage a bunch of developers in IT and for the most part it is very thankless work. End users forget all the cool stuff that they have access to is really the work of a LOT of code and maintenance by a few folks. Of course, this could all have been a Machiavellian scheme by you to further our complete dependence on this site while our ski jones boils over.......Hmmmmm.)
 

Greg

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Jul 1, 2001
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I might take a bit of a hit in terms of search engine referrals until all the forum URLs are reindexed, but it had to be done.

I guess I didn't need to be all that concerned about this. Traffic for November 2009 is so far almost 10% higher than it was in November of 2008, and that includes 2 days of very low traffic when we experienced all that down time. Not bad considering the warmth.
 
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