Is anyone having probs with ATS "timing out" today?

Also having lots of problems during afternoon Sunday, east coast time. Actually grateful its system-wide, I thought my wireless router was going loco.

Originally posted by Elostone
Been getting Error 503, 504 and 505 for the past half hour or so...only on this website.

Me too all day long. What is going on?

reply to post by EarthCitizen07


Thanks, but nothing working still, no matter what.

It's 9:40 PM PST. ATS still doesn't let me even post a new thread. Just times out.

I've given up for the day. Oh well. We'll see what's up tomorrow.

JR

Nice and smooth now

Pacific North West US.

reply to post by SLAYER69


Oh Slayer....You SLAY me! Just logged on and all seems fine so far this morning!

I'm Feeling Happy Now! Not my usual music, but appropriate

I'm glad everyone else is doing OK now.

Not me!

I gave up on the thread I started, that seemed to coincide with the ATS outage. No way to get in, a mod tried too, no way.

SO, I started a new thread this morning, thinking all might be well. I hope people will be able to open it, it's called" GOD'S HAMMER: The Hidden Story of Comet Apocalypse, AKA Elenin...

If anyone gets in, please U2 me, and tell me your trick!

Nope! I "think" I got the thread up, but who knows? It wouldn't let me back in!

I've never had this happen before.

Doesn't this seem to suggest it has to be more than the "outage"? Or is ATS still having "some" problems?

JR

reply to post by JR MacBeth


is it working again?

reply to post by OtherSideOfTheCoin


Awesome, It's working for me again as well.

reply to post by OtherSideOfTheCoin

Fingers crossed... appears that it might be!

whats going on cos it looks like ATS has been down for 5 hours looking at the recent posts page

There were a combination of events that coincided to give our servers some problems.

I believe we may now have things sorted out.

As an It guy, I know it can be a frustrating task, fixing a misbehaving server.

Gratz on the results

Thanks you

Most excellent I was feeling rather lost without my ATS

The issue seems to be a combination of two events:

(1) Some bad data in the database associated with one post

(2) A relatively minor DOS attack attempt from five different IP addresses


I don't believe the two to be related, but the timing is coincidental.


Either issue alone would have been easy to deal with, but in this case, they both happened at nearly the same time.

Im bored of the internet within minutes without ATS. There's not really that much out there on the interweb that interests me.

Originally posted by SkepticOverlord
The issue seems to be a combination of two events:

(1) Some bad data in the database associated with one post

(2) A relatively minor DOS attack attempt from five different IP addresses


I don't believe the two to be related, but the timing is coincidental.


Either issue alone would have been easy to deal with, but in this case, they both happened at nearly the same time.

Interesting... My mum used to say that problems come in 3's...

reply to post by SkepticOverlord


Oh come on overlord, surly you are at least a little bit suspicious that this was a direct attempt to take ATS offline.

And it worked, the site was down for 5 hours and based on your last post this was a deliberate attack.

Was any data lost or corrupted?

Originally posted by OtherSideOfTheCoin
Oh come on overlord, surly you are at least a little bit suspicious that this was a direct attempt to take ATS offline.

I think something deliberate would have been better designed.

And it worked, the site was down for 5 hours and based on your last post this was a deliberate attack.

We were functioning in "read only" mode for a major portion of the time.

Was any data lost or corrupted?

No.

During the entire event, loads on the database server were exceptionally low... but we ran several checks anyway.

Thanks for the update on the situation,
hope all is well now. I actually had to find
something else to do.

We may also be able to blame Microsoft.

After reviewing the logs, it looks like the BING spider exponentially increased its crawl-rate (15-20 attempts at different threads every second) as the problems became more severe. I've heard about webmasters complaining about the "manners" of the BING spider, so I'll look into this also.

So yeah... maybe this problem was "in threes."
(1) bad data in a post
(2) poor DOS attempt
(3) poor manners from Microsoft