[Polpolion]

With increasing frequency over the past few weeks I've been getting this "cloudflare website offline-no cached version available" page when browsing HLP. Are you guys just doing more and more maintenance, is stuff breaking, or is something going wrong on my end? It wasn't really a huge issue until yesterday when regular browsing was almost impossible. Before that, it was usually the kind of thing where I'd refresh and it would work.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Hacking attempts overwhelming the system has been the cause lately.

[headdie]

ahhh, gets me why this place is even worth hacking lol

[SpardaSon21]

The sysadmins know what they're doing, that's why.

[headdie]

The sysadmins know what they're doing, that's why.

[Zacam]

Daw. That gives me warm fuzzies.

In any case, CloudFlare is REALLY great at keeping -pages- up. Forums don't interact by static pages per-se though.

But yes, essentially there has been a rise of newer exploit kits out into the world and more disclosed vulnerabilities with web-hosting deals (C Panel, Plesk, etc) that basically means that at any moment, some scriptkiddie/bot-net will end up war-dialing us for a few moments.

There is also the possibility of a disgruntled individual using those pay-for private penetration testing sites too. I only list that as a possibility because the majority (if not singular point) of most of the target traffic has been directed at the forums specifically, and the other systems (Mantis, Wiki, etc) are happenstance collateral damage.

Still working out ideas and options though, so don't fret. So long as air goes in and out and blood goes 'round n 'round, I'm not letting this place close because of some bot-net/exploit troll.

[headdie]

that would explain it then, and good work

[Phantom Hoover]

Thanks, Zacam. Thacam.

[Black Wolf]

Thanks, Zacam. Thacam.

[MP-Ryan]

The last 8 hours in particular have been absolutely brutal for accessing this place.  3/4 attempts I make result in a CloudFlare notification.

[BritishShivans]

I found the fact I'm not running into anything you guys have for ages. I can access HLP just fine almost 100%, it only occasionally messes up for me and usually that's only for a couple hours. 

I wonder if it has anything to do with my location?

[NGTM-1R]

I have fifteen-to-thirty second wait times attempting to access any page on HLP, and have for...several weeks now, really.

[Fury]

CloudFlare really is hinky when it comes to accessibility of the site. I'm not even sure if it is in any way related to DoS attacks at any given time, because it seems that while some people can access the site just fine, others can't.

However, there's only so much you can do with single server and small pipe when DoS attacks are distributed in nature, which is the case here I believe. I really don't know how far rev_posix and Zacam went to mitigate DDoS before resorting to CloudFlare, but at the last resort it's always possible to contact hosting company and ask for their assistance.

[Beskargam]

Issue seems to be gone? So  BIG THANKS for keeping things running

[NGTM-1R]

Yeah, abruptly everything is better.

[Zacam]

So, in the midst of trying to sort out getting hammered all the time and utilizing CloudFlare to offset for that, we may have (or may not have) made a teeny tiny little whoopsie mistake.

Namely, to add all of CloudFlares IP addresses to whitelists as applicable for various things. Thankfully, Fury had a Doc Brown moment and advised us of the deflate package, which also caused for us to check the fail2ban package and etc.

So, we'll see if those changes address any of the up-time stability and inability for CF to concisely serve uninterrupted content to users in the even of us getting traffic flooded or not, while we continue building our case range of potentially abusive IPs.

[Fury]

Here's hoping these downtime problems are gone now.

[Phantom Hoover]

Won't CloudFlare only let us read forum threads, not post/search/do other things involving dynamic content?

[The E]

It won't even work there, given that forum threads are dynamically generated as well.

[Fury]

Encountered the site offline problem again and confirmed by several people on #hard-light. However, this does not seem to be a CloudFlare problem after all. When CF says the site is offline, problem also persists on direct.hard-light.net as well as game-warden.com which is not behind CF (why the hell not?). I noticed that direct.hard-light.net is directing to Alcibiades' Gamble site, you may want to redirect that to default Apache page.

I was able to connect to direct-hard-light.net via ftp (I don't actually have account with which to logon), so the problem is only with http. I seem to recall that Varnish was installed at some point, but I have no clue whether this problem appeared before or after Varnish was set up. If after, you may want to doublecheck Varnish isn't the cause of these problems.

Or it could be that HLP is still experiencing DDoS even through CloudFlare.