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Author Topic: Recent Outage / Upgrade  (Read 3791 times)

Offline Robo

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Recent Outage / Upgrade
« on: July 21, 2017, 11:27:35 am »
Wednesday morning we received notification from the hosting company that our account was suspended due to a reported phishing attacked hosted on the site.

Quote
Our abuse department has received a report of phishing being hosted on an account under your direct control. We do apologize for any inconveniences, however, to help prevent further abuse reports until this matter can be addressed, we were forced to disabled site access for your account.

They gave us no details of the report or phishing attack.   However they did off to give us root cause for a fee and tried to sell us 3rd party security service.   

There had been plans to move away from this hosting provider and make the site https: compliant by year end.  So this just accelerated the time line.

After about 1/2 day digging in,  it was determined that a well know streaming company was behind the "report" to the hosting company.   After further investigation into the issue,  it was determined that there was no phishing exploit on our site "targeted at their customers",  but rather someone had posted a link to a Chinese pirate site that was making one of their movies available for free.   So basically, the streaming company was falsely using "phishing attack on their customers"  to shut down our forum because there was a link posted that they did not approve of.

Migrating a forum at the spur of the moment created some challenges and did not go as quickly as hoped for.   On the positive side of things, the forum now has a SSL certificate and can be accessed securely with https.   Hopefully the outage is behind us at this point, but I am still working with the new hosting company to tweak some things, so there could be some performance/access issues over the next day or two.

Thank you for your patience during this transition.
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work." - Thomas Edison



Offline eltalia

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Re: Recent Outage / Upgrade
« Reply #1 on: July 22, 2017, 06:54:19 pm »
Thanks  Robo... the whole deal cost myself some time and now lost saved pages
after two software swapouts to fix "my end". Shoulda Coulda Woulda known better applies, hey :-)

If it helps in retrospect, one of the dialogs I saw pointed to an incorrectly
edited htaccess file... a hosts file in laymans terms. I trust youse are all over this stuff :-)

Cheerio.

Bill

Offline rober

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Re: Recent Outage / Upgrade
« Reply #2 on: July 22, 2017, 09:12:35 pm »
does worldwide use the same server? eltalia put up a link on bee source that I used to access the forum. if I do a general search & & use the link on the search page I still cannot access beemaster or worldwide forums.

Offline eltalia

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Re: Recent Outage / Upgrade
« Reply #3 on: July 22, 2017, 10:06:08 pm »
does worldwide use the same server? eltalia put up a link on bee source that I used to access the forum. if I do a general search & & use the link on the search page I still cannot access beemaster or worldwide forums.

G'day.
Where your "general search" is a g**gle.com return then those linked to pages are going to
remain broken until the spiders catch up Robo's work - "but I am still working with the new hosting
company to tweak some things".

Best way out of it for now is to refresh the bookmark and clear all browsing data, if your
software allows the freedom.

Cheers.

Bill

Offline Robo

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Re: Recent Outage / Upgrade
« Reply #4 on: July 23, 2017, 09:43:56 am »
Folks,

We are still working on some resource issues and the forum will have to be taken down at least one more time.   When things are completed google searches will work again.  It may take some time for the changes to propagate.   I just want to reassure everyone that this is being worked and we appreciate your patience during this.   This forum has had very little outages over the last 10 years and we are taking the time now to do a proper migration that will give us many more years of uninterrupted service.
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work." - Thomas Edison



Offline Robo

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Re: Recent Outage / Upgrade
« Reply #5 on: July 23, 2017, 03:29:08 pm »
OK folks,

We should be back online for good now.   There has been a lot of churn over the last few days, but I believe we have things back in good order on a new server.   I apologize for the outages, but they were not what we planned but rather by happenstance.   We do appreciate your patience.   Special thanks to eivindm for stepping in and giving a hand.
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work." - Thomas Edison



Offline BeeMaster2

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Re: Recent Outage / Upgrade
« Reply #6 on: July 23, 2017, 03:38:14 pm »
Thanks Rob and Elvin. It really is amazing how little this site has been down over all of these years. Great job.
Jim
Democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote.
Ben Franklin

Offline Fishing-Nut

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Re: Recent Outage / Upgrade
« Reply #7 on: July 23, 2017, 11:16:34 pm »
Thanks alot bee forum. Since you were down all my bees packed up and left. I had no one to ask so all I could do was sit back and watch.  :angry: :angry: :angry: just kidding, still got the bees. Keep up the good work folks. We all understand.
Take a kid fishing !

Offline eltalia

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Re: Recent Outage / Upgrade
« Reply #8 on: July 24, 2017, 01:31:22 am »
G'day.
Confirming it all works from "Down Under" and passing on kudos for
a hurdle well managed.

Cheers.

Bill

Offline Kathyp

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Re: Recent Outage / Upgrade
« Reply #9 on: July 24, 2017, 04:03:19 pm »
You guys are awesome.  Folks may not know how long Robo has been doing this but it's been YEARS   :cheesy:

He needs a party or something!!
Someone really ought to tell them that the world of Ayn Rand?s novel was not meant to be aspirational.

Offline eltalia

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Re: Recent Outage / Upgrade
« Reply #10 on: July 24, 2017, 07:19:12 pm »
It is early days but this honeymoon server is way more accessible (software friendly) than the old setup. Maybe a case of "after the storm the land is cleaned"?

Bill


Offline Acebird

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Re: Recent Outage / Upgrade
« Reply #11 on: July 27, 2017, 10:08:47 am »
Oh wow Robo I have been busy dealing with our own website changes and hadn't noticed much outage.  Unfortunately I know virtually nothing about the web and how it works so this has been one hair pulling contest.  I think the average person just thinks a website is just there and doesn't require any attention.  No it isn't just there and it requires a lot of attention to keep it there.  I can't imagine what it would take for a forum like this.  Anyways I am thankful for your expertise Robo for keeping it going smoothly.
Brian Cardinal
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