After the latest hosting problems - forum moved to another hosting provider

[jasonjohn]

Thanks for your work on this! Working for me atm

[TheGardner]

Issues with forum today again, now it seems to be working but only if you're logged in

I'm afraid, the forum have seen it's best times and now will slowly going to die. For me it looks like someone don't want to let this place happen and attacking it again and again.

So what I can say is, that everyone -in future- will find this place available, which will be good, but most of the time probably unavailable, because the place is under major attacks...
The traffic currently goes over cloudflare servers, which helps the attacks won't harm much, but this all wouldn't help posters much here, cause the page will be unavailable during the attacks.

Attached just a screenshot, which shows how much traffic hit the forums and to compare to the usual traffic, which is close to nill....

[TheGardner]

I'm tired to fight against this all and all I will do in the future is waiting and sitting these attacks out. That's all I can do. I won't spend more additional money in this all, just to play around for fun with these stupid attacker(s)...

[psbfannyc]

I'm tired to fight against this all and all I will do in the future is waiting and sitting these attacks out. That's all I can do. I won't spend more additional money in this all, just to play around for fun with these stupid attacker(s)...

Thank you for all your help Stefan. Can anyone here in the forum help here? It's not fair to put this on Stefan's shoulders. Anyone?

[oakey]

Sad to see this indeed. I am not a tech person, so I cannot be of any help I'm afraid.

It's working fine now though.

[leesmapman]

Do you have your own vps with full access? If so, you can check the apache access logs. At the moment a lot of websites are under attack from China (AI bots) and you can see that in your access logs.

I have the same problems with my VPS server, where I block a lot of IP adresses that generate the most hits, which helps a lot.

Verstuurd vanaf mijn SM-A528B met Tapatalk

[TheGardner]

First was thinking about AI bots and much of the problems in the past were to lead back to bots like GPT or other AI bot, but the last one was done by some human. Whenever I blocked a country (China) it more tried to hit the page from another country. Did I blocked Vietnam, it came from Brasil..
Did I blocked Brasil, it came from Argentina and Ecuador...

[leesmapman]

I think you can block based on user agents in the Apache config. But the DDoSer probably spoofs a "normal" user agent like a webbrowser or something like that.

[TheGardner]

But the DDoSer probably spoofs a "normal" user agent like a webbrowser or something like that.

That was the problem on the latest attacks. In the end I blocked China, Vietnam, Argentina, Ecuador and Brazil... But the last three countries have plenty of members here and that's the problem.

[leesmapman]

At work, we've been working on a solution for this problem. Someone suggested the following:
https://modsecurity.org

This is an open source extension for Apache and functions as a web application firewall. This means you can implement rules for suspicious behaviour and these will be blocked. These are based on suspicious mysql or javascript injections, but also mass-visits from ip-addresses, etc.

[leesmapman]

Another option is this one:
https://github.com/mitchellkrogza/apach ... ot-blocker

This is a pretty simple, daily updated list of ip-addresses and referrers that will be blocked when visiting your webserver. Again, you will need shell-access and root-access to install it all. It requires altering some apache-configs. After that all is done, you need to call a shell-script to update the list every day, so it might be handy to create a daily (cron)job for that.

I have this on my hobby/forum webserver and it works well. I got a lot less traffic, bots and the forum I'm running is a lot faster now.

[TheGardner]

Okay, Fatal error on Cloudflare this time... Guess we'll read about this in the next coming days. Major companies worldwide affected.

[leesmapman]

Okay, Fatal error on Cloudflare this time... Guess we'll read about this in the next coming days. Major companies worldwide affected.

Yes, a lot of websites were down. But I think it works again.

[TheGardner]

Okay, Fatal error on Cloudflare this time... Guess we'll read about this in the next coming days. Major companies worldwide affected.

If the forum is routed via Cloudflare, it isn't possible to auto-extend the domain certificate and so the forum was unavailable after the old certificate went invalid yesterday. That's the reason for the downtime in the last couple of hours.