System down email notice

[Pat Braden]

Quote:

Originally Posted by howieb4 Wow, I didn't think my posting would cause so much heat! My original thought was to have the boards hosting provider(godaddy, 1and1, etc) send out a notice from their side that their were issues with the board. After thinking about it, this would probably cause privacy issues by supplying them with all our email addresses, let alone these emails being considered spam and all that good stuff... In no way did I mean to imply in any form that Simon needs more work to do, or that he wasn't doing a fantastic job as admin. I was just thinking that something could happen "auto-magically" that required no effort from anyone. Gifford, you will notice I did refer to a "Catch22" in my original post. Lowmileage - I am just happy that one of my posts was a recipient of a reply from you. I laugh when I read one of your posts and admire your ability to look at the humorous side of things. . I finally feel that I am a true member of this board now.

[howieb4]

For low...

[Nicola]

Quote:

Originally Posted by howieb4 For low...

[lowmileage]

[smestas]

Sorry about the outages guys!!

On a regular planned site outage all of the pages on the site show a message explaining what’s being done and how long the outage should last for.

Unfortunately the recent outages have been taking the whole server down so the ability to send emails (from our server) is not even possible at the time. From time to time we get these DOS attacks and they literally cripple our server. Why these guys target us I have no idea. Some of you might recall the outage we had a few years back which was pretty damaging and we lost some data. In the future I hope to get professional services that will prevent us from going down during such an attacks and to protect our data. Until then I will do what I can to keep us going to the best of my ability. I do have a day job so sometimes even when there is an outage I cant get to it right away or as soon as I’d like, so don’t panic unless were down for more then a day.

If I sent an email out to the whole member list every time the server took a dive I would probably have lots of people mad at me. So for now please be patient whenever the site goes down.

Thanks to everyone for the concern over our community and for the feedback!


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[tubut]

One way to prevent DOS attacks is by filtering traffic in real time through devices such as Toplayer's Intrusion Prevention System (no affiliation, etc). Some of the filtering involves detecting an unreasonable amount of requests that originate from an IP address.

Such filtering possibly could provided by the hosting provider, but many of them have no interest in providing such services because the attacks increase the bandwidth quota (user pays for avg. or peak Mbps used).

[lowmileage]

Don't know how practible it would be or how it could be programmed, but it has been suggested that maybe this could pop up on each members screen (of course your pop-up blocker would have to be turned off).



Sorry Alfisti, but our beloved BB is down for a while



God help us all now, back to your scheduled day job

[Chsmadden]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tifosi Sending mass 'everybody in the membership list' type emails is a bad idea to start with as it can bring the forum to it's knees even when there's nothing wrong. Try to get such things sent while the forum is actually having issues and you're begging for some real problems. Better off to put notices on the home page as to what's going on, what happened, when it's expected to return, etc. as the homepage is generally much easier to get going again. (and if someone doesn't know how to find the home page, well............)

[Chsmadden]

And now I happily go back to primarily using Macintosh