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kevin
Site Admin


Quit Date:
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Posts: 9538
Location: cincinnati, oh

PostPosted: April 28, 2004 11:45 AM    Post subject: we're back! Reply with quote

most of us probably noticed that the site was down most of tuesday and wednesday (april 27th and 28th); the reason is that our web host came under a "distributed denial of service" attack that started at approximately 2:00 pm mountain time tuesday and continued through tuesday night, and may still be going on (if you'd like to know what a "distributed denial of service" attack is, there's a great - if long - explanation of it at http://grc.com/dos/intro.htm).

the short version of what "distributed denial of service attack" means is that a group of computers that have been hijacked by bad guys directs an unending stream of traffic at a server (or a group of servers) that host a website (or multiple websites), effectively knocking those websites off the internet by using all the available bandwidth so nobody else can reach them.

late tuesday night, the decision was made to change the ip addresses of all the affected sites, and we were all assigned new ip addresses; however, the site continued to be unreachable throughout the morning wednesday because it takes some time for ip address changes to propagate to the various DNS servers around the world (DNS stands for "Domain Name Server"; these are the machines that translate human-readable domain names - like www.woofmang.com - into machine-readable ip addresses).

as of approximately 11:30 am (EST) wednesday, i'm able once again to access the site, and i expect that most members will regain access to the site some time today, if they don't have it already.

i appreciate the efforts of all the members who helped me get the word out last night and this morning to as many other members as possible; because i was also unable to reach the site, i had a very incomplete list of member email addresses to work with, and asked those people whose address i did have to forward my messages to anyone else they had an address for (sort of like a cyber bucket brigade).

i will back up the site's database today, so that i have a more complete list of member email addresses to refer to in case of another outage.

thanks for your patience.

it's good to be back!
_________________

keep choosing life!

kevin

the zen of the quit
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