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Forum outage

Discussion in 'Announcements' started by Simon Hampel, 17 Dec 2016.

  1. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,035
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Apologies for the extended outage over the past few days.

    I've been dealing with multiple Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on my main web server, which has resulted in the server being isolated from the internet by our hosting provider until we can put some DoS mitigation systems in place.

    I've moved most of my sites to new servers and separated the more important sites onto their own server - so in future attacks on one site won't take all my sites offline at once.

    However, ZooChat is too big to move, so I've had to take a different approach and instead have set up a DoS mitigation service (Cloudflare) to try and minimise the risk of DoS attacks in the future.

    Because this makes some fairly significant changes to the way the site works from a networking perspective, there may be things I haven't tested for yet which don't work the way they should.

    So please let me know if you find anything which isn't working as expected or gives unusual results.

    I'd also be interested in feedback on whether you're finding the site faster and more responsive - part of the benefit of Cloudflare is a performance boost - any feedback is appreciated.
     
  2. Zooplantman

    Zooplantman Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    23 Jan 2008
    Posts:
    4,144
    Location:
    New York, USA
    Thanks for all of these efforts to keep us up and running!
     
    wensleydale likes this.
  3. Hix

    Hix Wildlife Enthusiast and Lover of Islands 15+ year member Premium Member

    Joined:
    20 Oct 2008
    Posts:
    4,549
    Location:
    Sydney
    OK, so yesterday I uploaded 40 photos to the new gallery for Caversham Wildlife Park. However, they don't appear in the New Media page/folder, when I go to look at all My Media, they aren't in there, but they are still in the Caversham gallery and credited to me.

    But after 24 hours nobody has looked at them (except me) because nobody knows they're there.

    :p

    Hix
     
  4. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,035
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Don't forget that photos you upload aren't "new" for you, so don't appear in the new media list.

    I can see the photos you uploaded in the new media - they also appear in your media list - Hix

    It's possible that when you looked things weren't appearing because they hadn't been fully indexed by the forum yet. I'm pretty sure it's working as expected though.
     
  5. vogelcommando

    vogelcommando Well-Known Member 10+ year member

    Joined:
    10 Dec 2012
    Posts:
    17,732
    Location:
    fijnaart, the netherlands
    Have the same problem as Hix. Pictures uploaded in the newly created Gallery for Vlindersafari - the Netherlands can only be found by clicking on the Gallery for this place and not in new Media section. Photos which I uploaded after the ones of Vlindersafari in an existing Gallery ( in this case Prague Zoo CAN be found in the new Media section so I think something isn't working as it should.
     
  6. Kifaru Bwana

    Kifaru Bwana Well-Known Member 15+ year member

    Joined:
    25 Jan 2006
    Posts:
    12,374
    Location:
    Amsterdam, Holland
    @simon, I am glad you are on top of things and hopefully fixing the remaining issues and the transfer of websites for Zoochat will run smoothly. Thanks for all the effort.