Forum Technical Issues

[mristuccia]

For the past few days the forum has been virtually unusable. Very slow loading and often errors in loading pages.
Is it only me or is it a general thing?

 

[diggles]

I'm seeing the same thing. Slow loading times and frequent "Oops we've ran into a problem" messages.

 

[darr]

No, Marco, it is not only you.
Whenever I have had time to visit here recently, I have received an "Oops, something isn't loading correctly" or similar message.
Something is amiss with the database and/or other files.

 

[mristuccia]

Darlene, Warren, thanks for the feedback.
I understand from the Site Talk forum that there has been a restore done last Tuesday due to a database corruption.
I think we are still facing some sort of side effects of that incident.
I hope someone is taking care of this.

 

[SimonW]

It was one of these errors where you make a fix and think it worked but you aren't sure if it has until a day later. It took a few different tweaks to eventually get it fully fixed but its been nearly a week since I saw the error so I think it's fixed.

I've also updated the OS this morning

 

[mristuccia]

And yet here we are again with the site slowness.

 

[drevil]

and again, over the past few days

 

[KC_2020]

Yesterday I just got a page of error code from the database.

 

[darr]

I get this error message about a third of the time when I try to open a post to read. It is frustrating to say the least, since this has been happening regularly, as well as images not appearing, and the forum looking discombobulating at times. Something is amiss with the database, or maybe the server is the problem. Whatever it is, it is making me question why I try to get in here anymore. IMO, this is a very unprofessional presentation from a company pushing publications.

 

[Knorp]

From Saturday this:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class 'League\Flysystem\AwsS3v3\AwsS3Adapter' not found in /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/config.php:40 Stack trace: #0 [internal function]: XF\App->{closure}() #1 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/FsMounts.php(17): call_user_func(Object(Closure)) #2 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/App.php(1099): XF\FsMounts::loadDefaultMounts(Array) #3 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/Container.php(28): XF\App->XF\{closure}(Object(XF\Container)) #4 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/App.php(2584): XF\Container->offsetGet('fs') #5 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF.php(932): XF\App->fs() #6 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/Util/File.php(738): XF::fs() #7 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/Error.php(346): XF\Util\File::installLockExists() #8 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/App.php(2360): XF\Error->displayFatalExceptionMessage(Object(XF\Db\Exception)) #9 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF.php(197): XF\App->displayFatalExceptionMessage(Object(XF\Db\Exception)) #10 [intern in /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/config.php on line 40

 

[Elderly]

/\ That is all double Dutch to me Bart

 

[mristuccia]

I gave up my hopes.
GetDPI is a Schrödinger Forum, it exists and does not exist at the same time.

 

[SimonW]

View attachment 224433

I get this error message about a third of the time when I try to open a post to read. It is frustrating to say the least, since this has been happening regularly, as well as images not appearing, and the forum looking discombobulating at times. Something is amiss with the database, or maybe the server is the problem. Whatever it is, it is making me question why I try to get in here anymore. IMO, this is a very unprofessional presentation from a company pushing publications.

You are getting that error because you are being blocked from even loading pages. This is because either the IP you are using has been blocked or the way you are accessing the site is suspicious and triggers the security software which puts a temp block in place to protect the server. Back in August a number of sites started experiencing a DDoS attack, for those who don't know what a DDoS attack is its where a network of 'computers' each send a mass amount of requests every second at a server which add up and become too much for the server to handle those requests which then drowns out legit traffic. The number of sites being attacked kept expanding each day. They were mainly using cheap cloud hosting providers to carry out these attacks as these allow you to spin up hundreds of instances quickly and deploy code to them all. These instances can costs less than $5 a month and you only get charged per hour of use so if you only use an instance for an hour you get charged 1/730 of the $5 so its dirt cheap.

This site ended up facing that attack (as did most sites). So not only did we have to ban a large number of IP ranges from a range of cloud hosting companies being used for this attack but we also had to tighten up the automated system to detect suspicious activity and put a temp block on that IP.

Now when you access the pages successfully your IP shows that you are doing so behind VPN's and Proxies. That in itself isn't a problem but some of the nodes you are using are in data centres that often belong to cloud hosting services and often they are ones who have a rep of being a haven for those with malicious intentions. For example, Clouvider is one that shows up for you a lot. Not only do they have a bad rep anyway but they were one of the worst offenders anyway but were used in these attacks and we had to ban a vast amount of their IP's (and of various others). So if your VPN node has the IP of an IP we have banned for being malicious then you will be blocked. You will need to use either a VPN who doesn't use problematic data centres for their nodes or use a different server in your VPN software. Or if its not that you need stop acting in ways that make you look like malicious traffic

 

[SimonW]

View attachment 224430

Yesterday I just got a page of error code from the database.

From Saturday this:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class 'League\Flysystem\AwsS3v3\AwsS3Adapter' not found in /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/config.php:40 Stack trace: #0 [internal function]: XF\App->{closure}() #1 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/FsMounts.php(17): call_user_func(Object(Closure)) #2 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/App.php(1099): XF\FsMounts::loadDefaultMounts(Array) #3 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/Container.php(28): XF\App->XF\{closure}(Object(XF\Container)) #4 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/App.php(2584): XF\Container->offsetGet('fs') #5 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF.php(932): XF\App->fs() #6 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/Util/File.php(738): XF::fs() #7 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/Error.php(346): XF\Util\File::installLockExists() #8 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF/App.php(2360): XF\Error->displayFatalExceptionMessage(Object(XF\Db\Exception)) #9 /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/XF.php(197): XF\App->displayFatalExceptionMessage(Object(XF\Db\Exception)) #10 [intern in /home/www/servers/getdpi/forum/src/config.php on line 40

We had an issue with the error logs, some of them failed to rotate so grew increasingly big. And when it tried to delete the old logs as it wasn't rotating the previous days logs there were no old ones to delete, just the increasingly big main one. And then it got so big we ran out of disk space which caused the issue. I should have received an alert about the disk space but for some reason that didn't send either

 

[KC_2020]

It sounds like you're trying to run with pretty limited resources if you can run out of disk space that easily.

I ran a vBulletin forum for a private school for 10 years with 3K users. It never crashed and we had thousands of attachments but I diligently kept ahead of it's expansion.

 

[Elderly]

@ SimonW; being non-technical, I didn’t ( and don’t need to ) understand your explanation of the problem,
but after failing to get on to the site I did try to access it via various territories using a VPN, but that did not solve it.

 

[darr]

You are getting that error because you are being blocked from even loading pages. This is because either the IP you are using has been blocked or the way you are accessing the site is suspicious and triggers the security software which puts a temp block in place to protect the server. Back in August a number of sites started experiencing a DDoS attack, for those who don't know what a DDoS attack is its where a network of 'computers' each send a mass amount of requests every second at a server which add up and become too much for the server to handle those requests which then drowns out legit traffic. The number of sites being attacked kept expanding each day. They were mainly using cheap cloud hosting providers to carry out these attacks as these allow you to spin up hundreds of instances quickly and deploy code to them all. These instances can costs less than $5 a month and you only get charged per hour of use so if you only use an instance for an hour you get charged 1/730 of the $5 so its dirt cheap.

This site ended up facing that attack (as did most sites). So not only did we have to ban a large number of IP ranges from a range of cloud hosting companies being used for this attack but we also had to tighten up the automated system to detect suspicious activity and put a temp block on that IP.

Now when you access the pages successfully your IP shows that you are doing so behind VPN's and Proxies. That in itself isn't a problem but some of the nodes you are using are in data centres that often belong to cloud hosting services and often they are ones who have a rep of being a haven for those with malicious intentions. For example, Clouvider is one that shows up for you a lot. Not only do they have a bad rep anyway but they were one of the worst offenders anyway but were used in these attacks and we had to ban a vast amount of their IP's (and of various others). So if your VPN node has the IP of an IP we have banned for being malicious then you will be blocked. You will need to use either a VPN who doesn't use problematic data centres for their nodes or use a different server in your VPN software. Or if its not that you need stop acting in ways that make you look like malicious traffic

Thank you for the explanation. I understand DDoS protection is challenging, and I appreciate the effort to keep the site secure. That said, the current configuration seems overly aggressive; many legitimate users are still being blocked, along with ongoing database and image errors.

Normal browsing shouldn’t trigger bans or access denials. From a user standpoint, this feels less like protection and more like instability. These issues have persisted for months, and it’s discouraging to see the forum decline from the reliable, well-run community it once was.

 

[Geoff]

Was unable to load for a while, then it was fine for a few days mid-last week; then banned again, and now it's back up. Hope its solved!

 

[mristuccia]

I hope I'm wrong, but it seems we are close again to one day or two of forum shutdown...