Server Overload
October 4th, 2008 at 09:09am Matt Margolis
My apologies for the recent downtime B4V has been experiencing. Last week we did upgrade the server, and things were running ell for a while, but following the VP debate something has been attacking our server endlessly. Hopefully we’ll have the problem resolved soon. If you notice the site is down email me at blogsforvictory@gmail.com and I’ll do the best I can to get things up and running again.
UPDATE 10:19 PM: So, things appear to be under control. The following graph shows the load on Blogs For Victory’s server in the past 24 hours:
As you can see, Blogs For Victory was being hit really bad overnight. I had to restart the server when I woke up in the morning, and twice more before things settled down.
Now, we’ve been slammed with spambot and all kinds of things in the past, but nothing like this. I’ve never seen a constant slamming like this. The server has been pretty much under attack since not too long after the VP Debate. Hardly seems like a coincidence.
Entry Filed under: Announcements
18 Comments
1. kjstrouble | October 4th, 2008 at 9:16 am
I am just glad you are back. Hopefully the attacks from whatever source will stop.
2. Danish Artist | October 4th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Something?
3. Kahn | October 4th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Matt and Mark, if your free speech is being systematically attacked by someone, that is both newsworthy and criminal.
A Denial of Service attack could be achieved via a single or a group of Internet addresses. Or, a more sophisticated attack could be widely distributed. This has been achieved against government sites by spreading a virus that compels target systems to all try and talk to the target at the same time.
I’d contact the State Police (especially if the server is in Virginia) and the Secret Service.
4. LiberalNitemare | October 4th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Hmmm, all the dem-o-libs say Palin failed to win the debate, but someone felt a sudden need to DOS the Blogs for Victory site.
Odd .
5. kmg | October 4th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
I find it hard to believe anyone would bother to attack this blog. Why waste the time on a place that only has about a dozen regular posters and maybe a couple of hundred hits per day? B4V just needs to get the RNC to increase their wingnut welfare payments so they can replace the hamsters running their server.
6. Danish Artist | October 4th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
“I find it hard to believe anyone would bother to attack this blog. Why waste the time on a place that only has about a dozen regular posters and maybe a couple of hundred hits per day?”
WTF are you doing here then?
When liberals are desperate to control the spoken and written word anything can happen - can you say “fairness doctrine”?
7. kmg | October 4th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Danish Artist, I’m saying that in the universe of the blogosphere, this site is a pimple on a gnat’s ass. I’m sure this site is being attacked just like Lieberman claimed his site was attacked in 2006. It didn’t happen; he just had a crappy server.
I used to come here because it was small and you could occasionally get into interesting discussions. Until the election is over, though, I don’t see that happening. Everyone that posts here has already made up their mind and nothing that is said here will change it.
8. phnx | October 4th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
kmg, does that mean you are going to leave and never come back. Oh puulllleeeeese say its true.
9. phnx | October 4th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Re the DOS, it only takes one looney leftists with the comupter skills. I have no doubt that they wnat this site closed.
10. YardBird | October 4th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
A number of conservative blogs have been under DNS attacks and have been having to move their server hosting and blogged at group sites in the interim during the move.
The Obama camp knows the power of the net and that is why their proxies are attacking every thing they can to diminish their impact.
11. FactCheck | October 4th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
A Denial of Service attack could be achieved via a single or a group of Internet addresses.
And it could take your guns away! Oh noes!
Love the paranoia in this thread, though. You sound more like 9/11 Truthers every day.
12. kmg | October 4th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
phnx,
No, I’m going to stick around just for the enjoyment of seeing your collective meltdown next month.
13. Kahn | October 4th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
State Police and Secret Service, report it. It’s a crime.
If the server is in Virginia the attacker may stumble upon a very nasty fact. Most of the Internet passes through Virginia. Ashburn Virginia to be exact. And we made VERY tough laws because of that.
14. pelirrojo | October 5th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Wow, everyone is blaming a DOS attack based on a graph of CPU usage?
look at the number of incoming packets. CPU usage could come down to something simple like a program which ended up in an infinite loop (yeah, those are a pain, moreso to debug).
15. Jeremiah | October 5th, 2008 at 1:11 am
11. TalkingPoint | October 4th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
No, it isn’t “paranoia”, it’s standing up for principles that true Americans hold near and dear, the same ones that Adolph Hitler took away from the people of Germany, the same principles that make America what it is, the greatest country on earth.
16. kahn | October 5th, 2008 at 1:30 am
The following is forwarded as a public service…
If you get an e-mail with “Nude Photos of Sarah Palin” in the subject line, do not open it. It might contain a virus.
If you get an e-mail with “Nude Photos of Hillary Clinton”, in the subject line, do not open it. It might contain nude photos of Hillary Clinton.
17. Timothy Horrigan | October 5th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
I like your blog because it is a good source for rightwing memes. Mark and the rest of the crew do write well and they do usually tell you what the source of their innuendos is. (Sometimes it is hard to see how their sources actually back up the innuendos but at least you can tell where something came from and what the logic behind it is.)
B4V is especially useful when it comes to Sarah Palin. You guys were talking her up way back when she was just an obscure first-term governor of Alaska who had just given birth to a baby. (In retrospect, it is amazing she was obscure at the time, given her very lonnnnng record of EXTREMELY high-level executive experience!) And even now you are a useful resource when it comes to deconstructing her campaign: for example, when she refers vaguely to Obama “palling around with terrorists,” B4V readers know she means that Obama happens to live in the same neighborhood as— and even happens to be a colleague of— a fellow University of Chicago faculty member who was an antiwar activist in the 1960s who did some time as a political prisoner.
18. Carlos | October 6th, 2008 at 2:22 am
Not sure about the coding expertise you have here, but you can do checks in your code to prevent things like this. Application level DOS attacks can’t be caught by your firewall…they instead have to be caught in code. You could set a limit on ip addresses hitting your site, but then you take the risk of kicking out those that may be hitting your site from a proxy server. It’s extremely easy to write a loop that will pound away at a site and bring it down. In fact, it’s too easy. Unless you write something in your code to kick out ips that hit your site…say more than 50 times an hour, you will probably see more of the same.