Biopowered - vegetable oil and biodiesel forum

General => Chatter => Topic started by: hifly on March 18, 2013, 08:36:29 PM

Title: veg oil forum down?
Post by: hifly on March 18, 2013, 08:36:29 PM
is it down or have i been banned in the ip banning thing thats going on?
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: Head Womble on March 18, 2013, 08:37:27 PM
It's working for me mate.
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: greasemonkey on March 18, 2013, 08:43:24 PM
Working fine for me. Looks like you may have been caught up in the problems. Do you want me to shout a mod?
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: hifly on March 18, 2013, 08:51:19 PM
its ok i have changed to my other broad band account and can get in now, i will let the mods know.

Cheers
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: julesandtash on March 18, 2013, 10:43:48 PM
Looks like VOD has gone to bed for the night.
I suspect with the current issues, there will be a lot more activity on here
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: Tony on March 18, 2013, 10:46:39 PM
Paddy did say it was up to 57Gb which has got to be getting expensive with his current host.
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: Head Womble on March 18, 2013, 10:59:41 PM
I was writing a reply, but couldn't post it, it wont even let me log out.
 
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: endorfin on March 19, 2013, 06:25:27 AM
I can't get on either, it says:

This forum will only be open from 18:00 to 22:00 each evening until further notice due to IP attacks

Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: Rossey on March 19, 2013, 07:48:13 AM
Paddy was saying last nite that the bandwidth is going crazy.
He has banned a few hundred IP addresses.
The forum will only be open between 18.00 to 22.00 until further notice.

Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: RichardP on March 19, 2013, 10:10:37 AM
Probably being attacked by Agri etc.

Anyway, I was going to be sending out immersion heater mechanical flanges to two members on the vod, but obviously can't get to my u2us. So if they read this please message me your names and addresses!!
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: Julian on March 19, 2013, 10:19:42 AM
Paddy was posting that the VOD was being "attacked" and using excessive band width.

Does anyone know exactly what he meant?  Was it robots viewing pages, or robots registering new accounts or what?
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: julianf on March 19, 2013, 10:32:18 AM
I find it a little hard to believe that anyone involved with biofuels would have the means or inclination  to start a DDOS attack, but, i guess, the site could have made it on to some "skript kiddiez" list?
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: Tony on March 19, 2013, 10:41:30 AM
The 2Gb usage IP address was a BeThere user, that IP browsed here too, they were using a tool for downloading content for offline reading - one that spiders the site to a specified depth.

Not malicious as such but certainly consumes a bit of bandwidth.  It probably accounts for the bandwidth bump Biopowered saw in January.
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: therecklessengineer on March 19, 2013, 11:19:13 AM
Given how far behind VOD is with the XMB software (which itself isn't great) I'm not surprised there are problems with attacks.
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: Julian on March 19, 2013, 11:44:04 AM
So would an easy fix be to ban all spiders and bots in the robots.txt file except perhaps google, Yahoo etc?

If the "attacker" is friendly I assume it should obey the file.
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: Julian on March 19, 2013, 11:58:22 AM
This is the current robots.txt file ...
====================================
# XMB 1.9.11 Search Engine Optimization File
#
# To help search engines avoid members-only areas of your board, you should
# move this file to the root path of your website.  If your board is
# not hosted from the root path, then you must also edit the file.
# For example, Disallow: /forum/buddy

User-agent: *
Disallow: /buddy
Disallow: /cp
Disallow: /memcp
Disallow: /misc.php?action=captchaimage
Disallow: /misc.php?action=list&desc=
Disallow: /misc.php?action=list&order=
Disallow: /misc.php?action=search&
Disallow: /post
Disallow: /search.php?
Disallow: /today.php?daysold=
Disallow: /u2u
Disallow: /viewthread.php?fid=

====================================

If I've understood the notes correctly, none of the instructions will be actioned as the forum's not the root. 

Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: Tony on March 19, 2013, 12:08:18 PM
You're correct Julian, they are all root URL disallows so won't affect the forum as intended.
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: Julian on March 19, 2013, 12:12:24 PM
You're correct Julian,

Blimey! That's a first.

So would that have a significant effect on band width, each spider crawling everywhere?  I assume the VOD must have quite a sizable data base by now.
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: Glycer-rides on March 19, 2013, 01:02:48 PM
Spiders? I was thinking 'Earwigs' were maybe responsible?
Title: Re: veg oil forum down?
Post by: Tony on March 19, 2013, 01:03:21 PM
You're correct Julian,

Blimey! That's a first.

So would that have a significant effect on band width, each spider crawling everywhere?  I assume the VOD must have quite a sizable data base by now.

It's possible.  But then you do want the site crawled for indexing with search engines.  The robots.txt should only really be used to prevent indexing of areas that shouldn't appear in search results (and some robots will ignore it anyway and crawl the lot).