Site appears to be having trouble loading

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freakazoid
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Site appears to be having trouble loading

#1 Post by freakazoid »

In the last few days, I've been having trouble loading TPFC. I can only access TPFC intermittently.

Any updates, Andrew?
is it stealth? ;)

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Andrew Lee
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Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#2 Post by Andrew Lee »

I just restarted the server and everything seems fine now.

Will closely monitor it for the next couple of days.

EDIT: I am still getting intermittent errors. Not sure what the problem is. Will have to look into it again later in the evening...

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joby_toss
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Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#3 Post by joby_toss »

I was afraid it's something on my end.

http://www.portablefreeware.com/ works fine for me now, but not http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.p ... th+options (I bookmarked the latter to get fast access to the [@] apps).

I get this:

Image

Something must have changed, as http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?q=[%40]&m= works now for my purpose.

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Checker
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Location: Ingolstadt [DE]

Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#4 Post by Checker »

I had problems yesterday (Feb, 07), too.
But now it seems to be fine.

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joby_toss
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Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#5 Post by joby_toss »

[@] search operator does not work for me anymore...

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__philippe
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Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#6 Post by __philippe »

PFC web site access has been erratic for me between FEB-05->FEB-07, (mostly not accessible at all, or awfully slow to load);
site status was confirmed "Down" over that period by repeated tests with this handy site accessibility checker:

http://www.isitdownrightnow.com

(Useful tool for confirming a web site server UP/DOWN global status, ruling out local end client-side anomalies.)

Thankfully, PFC access(from BE) is fine again right now.

__philippe

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SYSTEM
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Location: Helsinki, Finland

Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#7 Post by SYSTEM »

Yesterday the site loaded slowly for me as well. It's fine now.
joby_toss wrote:[@] search operator does not work for me anymore...
[@] works fine here if I'm logged in. Vigenere+ (added on February 4) is the newest private entry.
My YouTube channel | Release date of my 13th playlist: August 24, 2020

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Checker
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Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#8 Post by Checker »

@ joby_toss: [@] tested ... works fine.

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joby_toss
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Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#9 Post by joby_toss »

[@] and [#] work fine now (after restarting my browser), thank you!

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Andrew Lee
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Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#10 Post by Andrew Lee »

I can confirm there are some intermittent access issues with TPFC (though it seems to be better today), which is the hardest to fix, so it will need some time for me to work out.

Since the problem cannot be reliably reproduced, I need to look through the logs and see if I can identify any telltales.

Thanks to all for chiming in. Keep the error reports coming in!

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guinness
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Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#11 Post by guinness »

No problems in the last 4 hours.

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__philippe
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Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#12 Post by __philippe »

PFC server was misbehaving again on Sun 9-FEB-2014, erratic access between 15:00 and 17:00 CET

Would it be perhaps appropriate to provide a support e-mail address set aside to receive brief notification during extended "server down" events?

__philippe

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Checker
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Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#13 Post by Checker »

Again, TPFC site was hard to reach between 12:50 and 16:00 CET.

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Wolfghost
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Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#14 Post by Wolfghost »

Checker wrote:Again, TPFC site was hard to reach between 12:50 and 16:00 CET.
Confirm!

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Andrew Lee
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Re: Site appears to be having trouble loading

#15 Post by Andrew Lee »

Apologies for the late reply. I had a really busy week and didn't really have a solid block of time to look into this issue. Plus the issue is intermittent and cannot be reproduced on demand, which makes debugging really difficult.

Anyway, I think I had a breakthrough last evening. I was poking around at the various log files in the system. Then I saw these in /var/log/syslog:

Code: Select all

Feb 14 08:29:40 node2 kernel: [1472700.760454] TCP: drop open request from 37.140.192.202/16181
Feb 14 08:29:40 node2 kernel: [1472700.797664] TCP: drop open request from 37.140.192.202/7223
Feb 14 08:29:40 node2 kernel: [1472700.809924] TCP: drop open request from 37.140.192.202/12718
Feb 14 08:29:40 node2 kernel: [1472700.861615] TCP: drop open request from 37.140.192.202/22241
Feb 14 08:29:40 node2 kernel: [1472700.863818] TCP: drop open request from 37.140.192.202/37359
Feb 14 08:29:40 node2 kernel: [1472700.879039] TCP: drop open request from 23.234.216.122/53893
Feb 14 08:29:40 node2 kernel: [1472700.885875] TCP: drop open request from 23.234.216.122/53894
Feb 14 08:29:40 node2 kernel: [1472700.912008] TCP: drop open request from 37.140.192.202/14666
Feb 14 08:29:40 node2 kernel: [1472700.930421] TCP: drop open request from 37.140.192.202/59870
Feb 14 08:29:45 node2 kernel: [1472705.777591] __ratelimit: 188 callbacks suppressed
I googled around and found that it is a DDOS attack:

http://e-mats.org/2010/01/tcp-drop-open-request-from/

So I took the suggestion and did:

Code: Select all

echo 1 >> /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_syncookies
Immediately all the "drop open request" messages were gone. Instead, I get this:

Code: Select all

Feb 15 00:35:47 node2 kernel: [1530667.463090] possible SYN flooding on port 80. Sending cookies.
and the TPFC site seems to be back to normal now for the times I tested.

If there are any networking experts here who can offer some insight and suggestions, that would be most appreciated.

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