Site performance / possible DDOS attack

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archibalduk
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Site performance / possible DDOS attack

Post by archibalduk »

Unfortunately it appears we are currently the victim of a DDOS attack which is causing the website to crawl to a halt. You might encounter what looks like a holding page (which is normally displayed when a page cannot be found) or a max_user_connections error - see screenshots below. I'm trying to get to the bottom of the issue and am trying a few things out in the hopes of putting an end to this. In the meantime, you are likely to encounter occasional drop-outs when accessing the site. Typically the site will properly load if you hit "refresh" on your browser.

If anybody encounters any other issues then please do post in this thread and I'll check them out.

NOTE: I have enabled Cloudflare DDOS protection which you might notice will briefly appear in your browser window and will ask you to confirm that you are human (I believe should be a one-time check assuming you don't change IP address too often). Apologies for the inconvenience with this. I will remove this requirement once the attack is over.

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archibalduk
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Site performance / possible DDOS attack

Post by archibalduk »

It's been a pretty difficult few days with the site being down almost continuously for three days. I believe the issue with the traffic based attack was resolved on Monday but we have since had database connection issues. Basically, the forum software has to make a number of connections to the database but, for some reason, this is now exceeding the host's limit. Either the host has reduced the limit or something went wrong when upgrading the forum last week (it wasn't a straightforward upgrade owing to the server issues at the time).

I transferred the forum to a new database last night and this seems to have helped. I'm going to see how things go this weekend. If we still have issues then I'll upgrade us from the 3.2.x branch of the forum software to 3.3.x. I was hoping to do this later in the year so that I can properly test it, but I think this forum issue is going to force my hand.
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archibalduk
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Site performance / possible DDOS attack

Post by archibalduk »

We have now transferred to our new hosts and it looks like everything is up and running (*touch wood*). The wiki isn't yet working, but I'll look at that over the coming days.

If anybody cannot login then let me know via the EHM Reddit or our Twitter page.
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Tasku
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Site performance / possible DDOS attack

Post by Tasku »

Awesome! Well done, boss! 8-)
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nino33
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Site performance / possible DDOS attack

Post by nino33 »

Tasku wrote: Sun Aug 30, 2020 8:30 am Awesome! Well done, boss!
I couldn't agree more!

Thanks so much for your efforts Arch! :notworthy:


P.S. Love the old, old, old time hockey banner! Very cool pic! :thup:
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