March 11th-13th Downtime

[ZLoth]

What highway incident caused the forum and website to be down from Tuesday, March 11th to Thursday, March 13th?

[JayhawkCO]

What highway incident caused the forum and website to be down from Tuesday, March 11th to Thursday, March 13th?

See https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=35763.0

[kphoger]

See https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=35763.0

He's asking about the highway incident.

This was the one

[JayhawkCO]

See https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=35763.0

He's asking about the highway incident.

This was the one

Some people's kids, man.

[Alex]

What highway incident caused the forum and website to be down from Tuesday, March 11th to Thursday, March 13th?

Leading up to this starting around Wednesday last week was the 900,000+ GET and HEAD requests from Hong Kong, China IP addresses overwhelming the managed server that hosted AARoads. The responsiveness of the site degraded to awful, with long load times and pages timing out. My options to boost security were limited due to it being a managed server. All I could do was try Cloudflare and implement .htaccess codes. Both of these efforts were futile.

An option presented to me was to switch the site to a VPS server with root access (where I can block IP's, set up firewalls, utilize other security protocals). Since they offer a 30-day money back guarantee, I opted to proceed with this, which ultimately led the site to go down due to the transition and reset-up process.

[kphoger]

Leading up to this starting around Wednesday last week was the 900,000+ GET and HEAD requests from Hong Kong, China IP addresses overwhelming the managed server that hosted AARoads. The responsiveness of the site degraded to awful, with long load times and pages timing out. My options to boost security were limited due to it being a managed server. All I could do was try Cloudflare and implement .htaccess codes. Both of these efforts were futile.

An option presented to me was to switch the site to a VPS server with root access (where I can block IP's, set up firewalls, utilize other security protocals). Since they offer a 30-day money back guarantee, I opted to proceed with this, which ultimately led the site to go down due to the transition and reset-up process.

My bad.  It was this one:

Officers pinned a driver to the ground on a busy Hong Kong street on Tuesday evening after his car hit four other vehicles, including a police van.⁠ The drama unfolded at about 9.19pm when a police patrol van spotted a suspicious Mercedes-Benz parked near 178 Portland Street in Mong Kok.⁠ Officers approached to investigate but the car suddenly sped off. Police gave chase.⁠ The driver attempted to manoeuvre the Mercedes out of the jam but hit four other vehicles, including the police van in pursuit.⁠

[webny99]

What highway incident caused the forum and website to be down

It was this one:

Officers pinned a driver to the ground on a busy Hong Kong street on Tuesday evening after his car hit four other vehicles, including a police van.⁠ The drama unfolded at about 9.19pm when a police patrol van spotted a suspicious Mercedes-Benz parked near 178 Portland Street in Mong Kok.⁠ Officers approached to investigate but the car suddenly sped off. Police gave chase.⁠ The driver attempted to manoeuvre the Mercedes out of the jam but hit four other vehicles, including the police van in pursuit.⁠

Well, it's good to see someone has made sense of it all.   

[ZLoth]

All I could do was try Cloudflare and implement .htaccess codes. Both of these efforts were futile.

Ah. My primary use of Cloudfare is as a DNS provider only, no additional services. This is so that I can access certain services on my home server through a reverse proxy (Nginx) using a fully qualified domain name and a SSL connection using a LetsEncrypt certificate.

[NE2]

DST

[Max Rockatansky]

See https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=35763.0

He's asking about the highway incident.

This was the one

Some people's kids, man.

Why am I not surprised this was something from Victorville?  Victorville has a motley assortment of desert dwellers that would give Florida Man a run for his money.

[1995hoo]

Leading up to this starting around Wednesday last week was the 900,000+ GET and HEAD requests from Hong Kong, China IP addresses overwhelming the managed server that hosted AARoads. The responsiveness of the site degraded to awful, with long load times and pages timing out. My options to boost security were limited due to it being a managed server. All I could do was try Cloudflare and implement .htaccess codes. Both of these efforts were futile.

An option presented to me was to switch the site to a VPS server with root access (where I can block IP's, set up firewalls, utilize other security protocals). Since they offer a 30-day money back guarantee, I opted to proceed with this, which ultimately led the site to go down due to the transition and reset-up process.

My bad.  It was this one:

Officers pinned a driver to the ground on a busy Hong Kong street on Tuesday evening after his car hit four other vehicles, including a police van.⁠ The drama unfolded at about 9.19pm when a police patrol van spotted a suspicious Mercedes-Benz parked near 178 Portland Street in Mong Kok.⁠ Officers approached to investigate but the car suddenly sped off. Police gave chase.⁠ The driver attempted to manoeuvre the Mercedes out of the jam but hit four other vehicles, including the police van in pursuit.⁠

Alex said "GET HEAD," so obviously the driver must have been either receiving, or giving, a blowjob at the time of the incident.

[Voyager]

What highway incident caused the forum and website to be down from Tuesday, March 11th to Thursday, March 13th?

Wasn't me this time.

[CtrlAltDel]

Leading up to this starting around Wednesday last week was the 900,000+ GET and HEAD requests from Hong Kong, China IP addresses overwhelming the managed server that hosted AARoads. The responsiveness of the site degraded to awful, with long load times and pages timing out. My options to boost security were limited due to it being a managed server. All I could do was try Cloudflare and implement .htaccess codes. Both of these efforts were futile.

An option presented to me was to switch the site to a VPS server with root access (where I can block IP's, set up firewalls, utilize other security protocals). Since they offer a 30-day money back guarantee, I opted to proceed with this, which ultimately led the site to go down due to the transition and reset-up process.

Appreciate everything you do for this board, Alex. 

[Chris]

Leading up to this starting around Wednesday last week was the 900,000+ GET and HEAD requests from Hong Kong, China IP addresses overwhelming the managed server that hosted AARoads. The responsiveness of the site degraded to awful, with long load times and pages timing out.

On the Dutch road forum we also had this issue recently, with a continuous 100% CPU load on the VPS by requests from Singapore IP addresses.

These are probably AI crawlers which ignore robots.txt.

A temporary geoblock of IPs from the originating country may help. Our admin is also looking into a solution which feeds such IPs junk data back instead of loading the server.

[rschen7754]

Leading up to this starting around Wednesday last week was the 900,000+ GET and HEAD requests from Hong Kong, China IP addresses overwhelming the managed server that hosted AARoads. The responsiveness of the site degraded to awful, with long load times and pages timing out.

On the Dutch road forum we also had this issue recently, with a continuous 100% CPU load on the VPS by requests from Singapore IP addresses.

These are probably AI crawlers which ignore robots.txt.

A temporary geoblock of IPs from the originating country may help. Our admin is also looking into a solution which feeds such IPs junk data back instead of loading the server.

I usually feed the IPs into sites like whatismyipaddress.com and ipinfo.io. If it comes back proxy or webhost, there is really no good reason for them to be hitting the site that fast. ipinfo can parse out what block it is from and I block the entire range.

With Microsoft you have to be careful, it is hard to tell what is Bing and what is some VM somebody is running on Azure.