Was the Cellar hit again?
 

I had trouble getting on about noon today and noticed that there were no new posts since 1 am. At the same time, I could not navigate and I got a message that the Cellar was refusing connection.

Was it maintenance, an outage, or was the Cellar hit again?

I had the same thing, about the same time. Got the syntax error thingie. All is well now.

Just be thankful I'm here now. :lol2:

Yes, there was network congestion of the SOD variety between 4:30 am and about noon, and it's not clear whether the ISP or I have cleared it up 100% yet.

I was glib about that, on purpose. We are hit with some sort of DOS or similar attack on Apache. We continue to be hit by it. I expect to take the system offline for a few hours at some point to move it - a move many months in planning, long story.

If ever you can't reach the Cellar, just wait, do not panic, it will return.

Don't panic? Easier said than done.

I'd be less concerned about not being able to log onto any of the US Government sites than I am when The Cellar is unavailable. The Cellar is much more important to my day to day life.

And remember your towel.http://www.cellar.org/images/newsmilies/thumb.gif

Very nice.

Looks like a tag line to me..

OK! The system that the Cellar lives on should now be considered entirely compromised and rooted by a cracker far too clever to let me know exactly how he operates.

I *think* this is my fault, because I have not run the Cellar machine correctly wrt software levels and some of the software it runs is well out of date.

The system is continually cracked and used, I *think*, to generate DOS attacks. When it does this it completely saturates my connection and makes the system unreachable.

I have been planning for about 6 months now to move it to another, secure, co-located system but one last technical glitch does not permit me to move it immediately. I am waiting on another party to finish what they need to do in order to make it all work.

In the meantime, I have an alarm set to check the Cellar once every minute (!) and sound a loud alarm when it is unreachable. Last night it went off at 2am, 5am and 8am. Approx. The system was therefore "fixed" and DOS attack shut off before anyone could realize it.

But just now I had to drive home from the office where I'm spending 30 hrs a week, and that just cain't happen alla time, so the site may be down a few hours this afternoon if they strike again.

After today I should be home most of the time and able to respond to the alarm

And all I need is for this other person to come through with what they have to do...

The Cellar itself is thoroughly and securely backed up in two different ways, so your actual messages will not be lost, no matter what occurs.

The new system is on automatic update and so this sort of UT-based administration error cannot occur.

Does that mean you had to get up at 2AM and 5AM to fix things? Or was it automatic?

Either way, thanks for everything you do to keep things humming along. I hope this hobby continues to be fun for you, and doesn't turn into drudgery.

Worst-case - another system in the house is set to check the status, and because it's in another room, I have it set up to ring a VERY LOUD AND ANNOYING ALARM SOUND. This wakes me up, and I trundle downstairs and shut off the process that they're running, check to make sure everything's back on the air, and then go back to sleep.

Other than the Cellar there is precious little on this system, and the responsible thing to do would be to shut it down and fix it permanently, but because -- any hour now! -- it's all supposed to move off this system anyway, this is the path of least resistance.

I do that too, but the VERY LOUD AND ANNOYING SOUND is my cold 3 year old screaming for me from the other room so I'll come in and fix his blankets.

You are a parent too. :)

:lol: Me too! (cold 3yr old). I am trying to design some sheet suspenders for the bed that won't strangle the kid in the process, you can be on the test panel :)

I gotta remember to donate to the paypal link... Thanks UT, for all you do to keep this place up and running.

How did you get him to do that??? Ours just comes on in to our bedroom & climbs in.