Part of PAFOA Server Issue

[knight0334]

Since sometime over this past weekend, Alibaba(Asia's Amazon) and an IP range from Vietnam have been hammering the site.

17K+ guest users from those sources this morning.

Please hold on, sooner or later those sources will give up and we'll be back to our normal 504 errors.

[Emptymag]

First they give us stink bugs, then the lantern fly - now this...

[JaySmith]

Can you block that ip range?

[knight0334]

Can you block that ip range?

I did that lastnite for forum access, but they can still load the initial page that show the IP ban warning. The IP ban helped some, really stabilized things in between their surges.

In short, they can still send requests to load page, which cripples things if there are too many. They need to be blocked at a firewall before the server - which is well above my pay grade.

Looking at the visitor list - it looks like they are trying to view every possible page, including member profiles, on this site.

[JDA58]

I was getting this today.

[45Doll]

I did that lastnite for forum access, but they can still load the initial page that show the IP ban warning. The IP ban helped some, really stabilized things in between their surges.

In short, they can still send requests to load page, which cripples things if there are too many. They need to be blocked at a firewall before the server - which is well above my pay grade.

Looking at the visitor list - it looks like they are trying to view every possible page, including member profiles, on this site.

Doesn't your hosting site administer your firewall for you? They should do this for no charge.

[bogey1]

Make me head moderator and I'll have alibaba working for walmart.

[JaySmith]

Doesn't your hosting site administer your firewall for you? They should do this for no charge.

It depends on the hosting. Over at the poofa i literally rolled my own everything from scratch, which gives me complete control. But I also have cloudflare, which protects from ddos and does some caching to cut down on bandwidth. However if there are legitimate requests in the tens of thousands, i'd have to block that myself.

[knight0334]

Doesn't your hosting site administer your firewall for you? They should do this for no charge.

I don't know, I only admin the forum activities.

I'm sure the host does have a firewall, but few firewalls will block legit queries until you actively deny access from certain IP addresses or ranges.

Most firewalls are set up just to block certain TCP/IP ports as default. If you notice that certain IP ranges are problematic, you then need to add those IP's to a denial list.

What was happening recently is that the queries are coming in as legit to view the pages - but an Asian Metric Shit Ton of them in short order.

[Emptymag]

They were hoping to sell lists of info on forum members to the Harris administration.

Ooops.