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Report on server downtime on August 8th

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mouser:
The server was the subject of some kind of mail attack yesterday, August 8th. and was down for most of the day.

It looks like our current host (we pay $210 a month for this account!! yipes!) is not staffed by people who have a good grasp on things (www.servstra.com) as i've written about before and i don't think they know what happened or how to prevent it from happening again, so it may be that we will get attacked in the exact same way in the coming days.

Basically it looks like some spammer used random fake email addresses from donationcoder.com to spam people, and so all the messages were bouncing back to us.  It's not clear yet to me (nor i guess to the server admins) whether this spammer somehow actually got our server to send these emails out to random addresses, or whether they just managed to spoof our address on the return address.  I will report more as I find out more.

If so, don't panic!  I am always on top of it and doing my best to get us up asap, and the site will never be down for long.  what doesn't kill us just makes us stronger.  and in the world of hosting, what does kill us only kills us for a little while.

Remember in the early days of the site a year ago we had some growing pains as we moved to a dedicated server, but once we got it sorted we had a blazing fast server and user space.  Well it seems now we are experiencing a bit more growing pains and I'm working to split us up onto 2 servers, a main server for the website, and an auxiallary server for user accounts, which we can have fun on and give our members some space for their own stuff.

Anyway, back to work and fun.  And thank you for being understanding.  The only thing I can tell you is that I try my heart out to get us up as fast as possibile and I'm always working to try to make this site and server better, faster, stronger, more stable, etc., but it's a learning experience for me.  I appreciate the understanding and patience.

AbteriX:
Thank you for all of your support  :Thmbsup: Very appreciated  :-*
It was a dull morning without DC.


what doesn't kill us just makes us stronger-Mr. Mouser
--- End quote ---
The same proverb we have in germany too :D

Carol Haynes:
I guessed it might be a DoS attack or something similar.

I have been getting increasing amounts of crap to my domain names (random user names) and lots of 'undeliverable' receipts from spoofed email addresses based on my domain names.

I think I will point my sites back to my domain name manager and then use web forwarding to my domain space on the DC servers. That way I can manage mail via their servers and it will reduce the amount a crap (at least a little) that is filtering through the DC servers. It souldn't make much difference to me in the long run (just accessing my domains will need an extra hop or two).

Glad it is all sorted for the mo!

mouser:
i am going to hire us a professional server management contract so we will get to a state where we are well cared for and protected by people who know what they are doing - i have no intention of resting until our servers are as stable as is humanly possible.

nudone:
great to see everything back to normal - DC does leave a very noticeable hole when it's not there.

will a new host be sought or are there advantages staying put?

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