Website Outage

Message 1 of 12 (700332) 06-02-2013 6:06 AM

I apologize for the inconvenience.

Message 2 of 12 (700348) 06-02-2013 12:58 PM

Reply to: Message 1 by Admin 06-02-2013 6:06 AM

A DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) requires network expertise and resources. Whoever did this was not only angry but skilled and well resourced. Maybe some of our members with expertise in this area can comment. Members can't respond to threads in this forum (The Public Record forum), so I'll move this thread over to the Announcements forum.

Message 4 of 12 (700351) 06-02-2013 1:24 PM

Reply to: Message 2 by Admin 06-02-2013 12:58 PM

Or maybe...
DDoS is often a blanket term for a wide variety of attacks (people use that term instead of DoS) - and not all these require large amounts of resources.
(This moves out of my area of expertise but...) some attacks use system settings and server errors to use up the victim server's resources.
I don't think those kinds of attacks require more than just expertise.

Edited by Panda, : No reason given.

Message 5 of 12 (700376) 06-02-2013 4:09 PM

Reply to: Message 1 by Admin 06-02-2013 6:06 AM

I agree with Panda's comment. There are huge botnets built out of trojanized machines, and they can probably be leased for a modest fee. So it mostly takes determination, rather than expertise, to mount a DDOS attack.

I mostly see this as someone who investigates phishing (in an amateurish way). That's another use of botnets.

Message 7 of 12 (700565) 06-04-2013 2:08 PM

Reply to: Message 1 by Admin 06-02-2013 6:06 AM

You're getting slack, that's what it is.

Message 9 of 12 (700572) 06-04-2013 3:41 PM

Just curious. I'd freak if EvC disappeared.

Message 10 of 12 (700574) 06-04-2013 4:11 PM

Reply to: Message 9 by 1.61803 06-04-2013 3:41 PM

I think it was just one day, all day Saturday the 1st.

I'll have you know, I only checked to see if it was up, like, 10 times.

I don't freak, but I'd be pretty disappointed.

And not just because of the potential discussions that I'd loose, but also because of the loss of the records of all the posts I've written over the last... awe geez... 8.5 years.

Message 11 of 12 (700575) 06-04-2013 4:17 PM

Reply to: Message 1 by Admin 06-02-2013 6:06 AM

Its no biggie.

But I do appreciate the explanation, so thanks.

I was just mentioning to Phi that losing the record of my posts would disappoint me as much if not more than losing future discussions.

I know you originally invented this software to sell at some point, and I've seen you admit that you've kinda missed the mark with the transition to tablets n'stuff.

Have you ever considered the value that some of us might place on the posts we've written here?

I don't blog or anything, but I can imagine myself in the future wishing that I could read over some of my old EvC posts, or share them with my family or something.

What kind of format are they stored in? How big are the files? Is it possible for you to mail me a flash drive with all my posts on it, or something like that? I'd be willing to pay for it.

What if it was a copy of each entire thread that I've ever participated in? Would that get too big?

Would I need special software to read the data?

Message 12 of 12 (700633) 06-05-2013 9:32 AM

Reply to: Message 11 by New Cat's Eye 06-04-2013 4:17 PM

I'm a bit short of time right now, so let me just briefly provide a couple answers.

I value the post history as much as anyone. The database is backed up periodically.

Posts are stored in the database in HTML format. The current size of the database is about 2 GB, most of it messages. It wouldn't be too difficult to add a feature that throws the HTML for an entire thread into a file instead of a page at a time out to a browser, but I have no plans to do that at this time.

The thread index you get when you click on your name will tell you how many threads you've participated in, but it wouldn't give you an estimate of the size. Obviously it wouldn't be too big, since the total of all messages is around 2 GB. If your threads represented 1% of the total then that would be around 20 MB, a very modest size by today's standards.