As some of you may have noticed earlier today, the site was displaying a configuration related error message. I am frankly a bit confused at what the cause was, as when I modified my web.config to show me the error, it went away!
Also, if you’ve gone to use the contact me form, you may have noticed I added a captcha to the form. I hate to do this, as I hate captcha’s. Unfortunately I have a script kiddy attacking the site as a result of my comments about C++. ( sigh ) His/her attack script was resulting in an annoying number of emails being generated and thus… the captcha.
As a result of all of this, I’ve decided to take today to apply all the outstanding updates. This unfortunately means a bit more downtime. So if you have a bit more trouble today accessing the site, this is why. Hopefully when I am done we will have an all around happier, more secure and quick GameFromScratch.com.
Again, sorry for the outages.
EDIT: Had another outage, so I did a bit of investigating and found out why. Apparently our intrepid hacker friend had two other friends who more or less have been slamming the server all day with hacking scripts. GameFromScratch is actually hosted on pretty solid servers with a good sized pipe so we can survive this.
What we cannot survive however is running out of disk space.
Oops.
Apparently the hack attempts grew the log files quite a bit which was resulting in running out of disk space causing the error. The log files weren’t actually filling up the space ( that was my screw up, I automatically back up a database daily… didn’t realize that database was up to 2GB in size! So I pruned a few dozen 2GB backup files and now a 200mb log file wont do a thing), but they illustrated that I was running out of disk.
That said, this was just slapping a band-aid over the problem, so I’ve gone one step further. First off, I implemented firewall level blocking, so all of these addresses are now blocked. Next I put in intrusion detection that will automatically reject people making too many connections. The threshold is pretty high, you have to try pretty hard to trip it if you aren’t a bot, but if you receive a 403 message, this is why.
Hopefully this doesn’t cause any of you problems. If you do have connection problems to this site, please let me know!
It’s a shame I have to do this stuff at all. Some people take their programming languages FAR too seriously.