Temporary downtime

[Kirauni]

Dear members and visitors of Lea Halalela,

I'm sorry to inform you that our page has been temporarily not available do to some security updates of our server. I've not been informed about these updates beforehand by our provider and therefore I couldn't tell you about it. Today, from 11:00 am to 5:30 pm there might be some connectivity issues with the forum. So far, there has been no data loss.

Of course, I'll let you know once the work is done.

I'm sorry for this inconvenience!


Yours,

Kirauni

[Kirauni]

Hi again!

It looks like we actually had two problems today. One being the software update and the other one being a huge amout of requests our server had to handle. However, that didn't have anything to do with Lea Halalela, but with my forum over at pride-lands.org.
Either a very nasty person tried to flood our server (I don't know the right term in English, but it's similiar to "flooding".) or a very annoying search bot/spider did that. Anyhow, I've managed to keep them out and the page is running again.
Thank God there has been no data loss.

Let's hope that it's over now. Of course, I'll let you know there are still some issues. For now, I'll have a closer look at the server's logfiles to see, what exactly has happened.

~Kirauni http://www.pride-lands.org/images/smilies/users/kirauni.png

[Nit]

It's called DDOS. ;)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack#Distributed_attack

Cloudflare might help with attacks like this one.

[Kirauni]

It's called DDOS. ;)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack#Distributed_attack

Cloudflare might help with attacks like this one.

Heheh Tahnks.

Actually, after checking the server's logfiles carefully, we can assume that the downtime has been caused by an DDOS-attack.
I knew that term as well, but when I first wrote my annoucement, I was very careful with naming things, because I had to check the logs first to make sure what had happened. On top of that, I didn't want to use the term "attack" to quickly, since I merely started investigating the logfiles.
You know, after Lea's horrible expierences in the past few years with hackers, data loss and relaunches, I didn't want to worry people too much, before I really knew what was going on.
Now it's safe to say that all these problems were caused by a DDOS-attack. Of course, a service like cloudflare could help preventing such things, but on the other hand I don't want to get another additional service provider involved or handling my/our data... if you know what I mean. I'm a bit careful about privacy policies and such. But we'll see.
By now, I've changed some settings and restrictions so that the attacks have stopped. But then again there's no such thing as a 100% security when you're browsing the internet so of course this can happen again.

So yeah... that's how things are right now but the way I see it, Lea is running fine again :)