Are we suffering attempted DDoS attacks.

[Brickwizard]

The last few days [only occasionally] I have had the cloud flair, unable to connect screen.
What I have notice is that, in a normal day we have around 500/600 visitors/bots and on the days it's crashed there were over 1000

 

[wizardfromoz]

I had my first one yesterday Brian, lasted only a couple of minutes and then good to go, was that your experience?

A couple of other Members have reported likewise - we'll try to keep an eye on it

Thanks

Chris

 

[Brickwizard]

Hi Chris, yes the same as you only lasting a short while, I will try and keep an eye on the numbers [if happens again]

must be time for your evening bevies
Avagoodevening
Brian

 

[wizardfromoz]

Cheers mate, c u 2morrow

 

[Brickwizard]

short outage at 14-13gmt 1254 visitors/bots host server error

edit .. after 20 mins dropped back to the 500 mark

 

[arochester]

Watch bots/web robots/ web spiders/web crawlers. Some of them are getting heavy. Make use of the "Members Online" link.

It seems questionable that they have access to Members Profiles.

 

[X104825]

Maybe a CHAPTA is needed?

 

[KGIII]

CF has DDoS protection. That'll throw a specific error message. If it had been an intentional DDoS, the outages would be much longer.

I've seen a few of them and they could just be (and probably are) just intermittent network drops on the linux.org side of things. We could also be getting to the point where the resources aren't enough for this much activity. But, I'd stick with my first guess. It's just simple network issues between CF and linux.org.

 

[X104825]

Are there fake accounts being made?

 

[Brickwizard]

I've seen a few of them and they could just be (and probably are) just intermittent network drops

It's strange, that as I have been keeping an eye on it, the crashes only happen when there is a sudden influx of visitors/bots too over 1000

 

[X104825]

I wiill start keeping stats too maybe the server chrased

 

[X104825]

I've been working on excel and made a statistics chart of average visitors there is a overall average of 534 visitors at noon

 

[KGIII]

It's strange, that as I have been keeping an eye on it, the crashes only happen when there is a sudden influx of visitors/bots too over 1000

Yeah, it could be that the site's just getting more popular than the hardware can handle. It results in much the same as a DDoS, except it's not an attack it's just the site's limitations.

There are words for something similar, like 'being slashdotted'. Smaller sites would get a link on Slashdot and the number of visitors is higher than thy ever expected or prepared for. This causes the site to go down. Back in the day, I had one site get Slashdotted and it cost me like $300 in bandwidth overages. (Bandwidth was much more expensive back then.) I was pretty annoyed.

Other names would be, "The Reddit Huge" or "Farked". However, Slashdot predates all of those.

 

[Brickwizard]

Down again today at 14-30 GMT 502 gateway error, again just over 1050 guest/bots in line

 

[Deleted member 111282]

Are there fake accounts being made?

Ive seen a number of accounts being made just to troll, and I reported one the other day. Ive also seen an account made just to ask for advice on some kind of sketchy, possibly illegal activity, which was removed shortly afterward. While its great that this site is gradually gaining popularity in the Linux community, its bad that this kind of behavior is becoming more rampant, which makes the mods' jobs harder.

I've seen a few of them and they could just be (and probably are) just intermittent network drops on the linux.org side of things.

That's what I'm thinking as well

 

[KGIII]

Yeah, I suspect we're just getting more popular than our infrastructure can handle.

If folks would like to subscribe, that'd maybe make it easier for the admins to decide to invest in more hardware. (I'm assuming it's just a VPS, as a modern dedicated box could certainly handle this load. Well, should...)

 

[Brickwizard]

OK who's avin a Larf !! 5 times today I have had the old 504 error Linux server problems, off-line for between 30 & 90 seconds then back on

 

[dos2unix]

Same here. 3 or 4 times today.

 

[Condobloke]

In my day (Australian time....it is 05:34 am now)....I have no errors of that nature at all.

my pc is on from 4am through to approx 8.30pm everyday

I use 1.1.1.1 & 9.9.9.9 ....just in case that has any bearing at all

 

[KGIII]

DNS wouldn't matter (likely) unless the DNS had been changed. The errors I have seen are CloudFlare errors, so it's likely networking issue between the actual server and the CDN.

If it was a 503 error, it'd bolster the idea that we're growing bigger than our shell and should soon molt to a server with more resources. It still could be that and CF just giving the only error it knows to throw when the network is down.

In other words, I'd not worry too much.