Yesterday was hectic day for the management of this blog. Between noon and about 2 PM PT the hosting server was overloaded with requests. Memory and I/O maxed out preventing viewing or management of the blog.
So, new tools have been added and more IP addresses have been blocked. Unfortunately Go Daddy’s metrics tools do not provide the information needed to deal with an attack in real time. So, it is an arduous process of downloading and analyzing logs. But, with I/O maxed out one cannot download the logs…
Also, most of the standard ‘go-away’ tactics weren’t working. So, I had to learn new ways to regain control. So, when I am fighting off an attack you may see a B&W page announcing the site is down for maintenance. I may pretty the page up… or not. I can usually recover in a few minutes once I take the site down. So, if you see the page, check back in an hour or so.
I’ll be adding more tools so I can more quickly find the attack source and block it. Most of these attacks seem to be scrapping the site for content. Now that I’ve blocked image leeching, using my images by linking to this server, the images are being downloaded using up a LOT of bandwidth. I wouldn’t mind that much except like The Flash they try to grab everything at hyper-speed.