Are we suffering attempted DDoS attacks.

[Condobloke]

Before Rob started showing the 'new' security warning/scan.....I saw that message countless times....it was a matter of either that message or the 502/bad gateway

Since the introduction of the 'new' scan, i have nor seen it at all......and only one 502 just after the new scan was started

The site appears more stable since the new scan

Happy camper here

 

[Old Tom Bombadil]

The site appears more stable since the new scan

It sure does. The "Oops..." error is quicker to fix than the Bad Gateway, and I have some control over it.

 

[bob466]

Every time I click on the site I get...Linux.org is checking....sometimes lasts for a few seconds and sometimes for much longer.

 

[Deleted member 137406]

Yeah as much as I hate it and as big of a PITA as it is its a have to have thing.

We bitch about the 502 error.
We bitch about the Oops thing.

Poor old @Rob.

 

[KGIII]

Every time I click on the site I get...Linux.org is checking....sometimes lasts for a few seconds and sometimes for much longer.

That's CF checking your bits to see if you're a human. It's gonna happen. If you stay active, it happens less often. I am here often during the day, at least when my day allows it, so I may only see it a couple of times - or if I change my IP address.

 

[wizardfromoz]

On #275, when it happens (only occasionally, now) I just press the back button and am brought to a refreshed front page from which I can log in.

Overall, I am a much happier camper, and kudos to @Rob

Avagudweegend, all.

Wiz

 

[KGIII]

Overall, I am a much happier camper, and kudos to @Rob

There's a lot less attempted spam, which is nice.

 

[MikeWalsh]

There's a lot less attempted spam, which is nice.

@KGIII :-

Heh. Indeedy; that, I can sympathise with. When I joined the BleepingComputer staff in April 2020, I got a baptism of fire in that respect.....BC appears to be a particular target of spammers, and with everybody being stuck at home because of the global lockdowns (including the spammers!), well.....you can imagine what it was like.

10 of us were at it almost continuously, trying to keep on top of the buggers; many had found ways to script stuff so they could post quicker than we could ban.....

(*sigh*)

Moderation CAN be a hassle.....even with all the right tools. No?


Mike.

 

[KGIII]

Moderation CAN be a hassle.....even with all the right tools. No?

It's definitely a labor of love.

If you haven't noticed anything, that's good. That means we have a good success rate vs. spam.

For the most part, you should never see the spam. We have some pretty neat tools for this. I'll avoid detailing them, but you can tell the efficacy by how little spam actually reaches the 'published' status.

Other than that, I don't use the moderation tools all that much. I prefer it that way. I'd much rather just let people know there's a concern, often prompted by users hitting the report button. More often than not, I just keep an eye on stuff, as I figure folk's'll tucker themselves out eventually.

I don't actually like banning people. I don't actually like using moderator tools - other than maybe moving a post or merging one with another.

As I've often described my role: I'm pretty much just a janitor. That includes when someone spews **** in a thread and I've gotta clean it up.

 

[KGIII]

We had two days with just a minute of downtime each day. Currently at 99.5% and holding.

 

[Condobloke]

Quite a few 502: bad gateway's this morning

Australia, Sydney time 0500

 

[Brickwizard]

uk has been fine for me

 

[Rob]

Yeah there was at least one main one about an hour ago .. other than that no real big blips.

 

[sphen]

Perhaps those nasty "DDoS for Hire" businesses are using Linux.org as an unaffiliated demonstration target for prospective customers. :-o

They got tired of targeting websites with cute cat photos.

 

[Condobloke]

In all, approx 16 bad gateway:502's is less than an hour

 

[wizardfromoz]

David G @KGIII and I manually clobbered about 60 spammers last 48 hours, someone may have got peed off?

 

[Condobloke]

LOL....take your pick !!

 

[ML_113]

If you have VPN ... connect to NYC.
Just kidding.

 

[KGIII]

someone may have got peed off?

I'm not seeing much in the way of outages, so they're likely short outages. The monitor could miss any outage with a duration of under a minute. A solid DDoS tends to take sites down for longer than a minute - but we're behind CloudFlare. So, the expected behavior would be a rapid recovery from an attack.

Note: This doesn't mean we aren't experiencing outages, just that they're less than about a minute, as the monitor checks every 60 seconds.

Quite the contrary, actually. We've moved up from 99.5% uptime to 99.6% uptime.

The CDN that I use (my site is much more static) seems to handle attacks a bit differently than CloudFlare. It'll just show the static content and cache requests if my site's server is actually having issues. At least that's what it should do.

I've never actually checked that domain for uptime, but it starts with at least a 99.97% uptime. That's considered exceptional and sites like Reddit have more downtime than that. ('Snot my doing, it's a good hosting company.) I just set an uptime monitor for the domain and the words 'Creative Commons', so we'll see...