Downtime Tonight (Friday 7th July)

[Grant]

Hi everyone,

As you can probably tell the forum is online again, it's been offline for a number of hours tonight, it's taken me awhile to get it sorted and it's still not completely ship shape. Took me longer than usual because being a Friday night I was in town watching a band....

Anyways, the site was temporarily suspended as was the Isee Stars site (they both run under the same hosting), the reason being somehow spam was being sent from the website. I've tracked this down to two possible causes (probably a mixture of the pair). Firstly when the newsletter was sent the other day, for whatever reason people were sent multiple copies, this meant 3 X 359 members = lots of emails. I'm guessing this were flagged as spam by some of the providers and hence a spam flag being raised here.

The other possible cause comes from the Isee Stars site where an email address is available too members to send pictures too, if you send a picture to this specific email address with the subject crafted to include your username and upload password, Isee Stars automatically checks the email address, if the subject is valid it then saves your picture for you. If the subject isn't valid and your not a real user or you entered the subject incorrectly it sends you an email to tell you. It seems that the spam bots have been sending lots (85,000+) emails to this upload email address, obviously each one has an invalid subject so Isee Stars then merrily sends them an email back telling them theres a problem uploading the image. However, when spam bots send emails they tend to spoof other innocent users email addresses, so Isee Stars has been sendning back these error messages to unaware users. These then get marked as spam and it looks like Isee Stars is spamming when in fact the issue is with the spammers sending crud to Isee Stars and Isee Stars sending them an automatic message back.

Anyway, complicated stuff, took a bit of figuring out that one, hopefully the cause of the problem is fixed now, I just need to clear up a few of the symptoms and hopefully things should be ok....

Sorry about that folks, I'm just glad it happened so late on a Friday night so hopefully not to many of you were effected. I hate spam!!!!

Cheers,

Grant

[GazOC]

Took me longer than usual because being a Friday night I was in town watching a band....

How dare you have a private life!! :nono:

[anthony]

Cheers Grant,

What a huge amount of needless work!

Anthony

[Kain]

When I was younger I used to go fishing with a can of Spam and a can of sweetcorn!

Used to catch all sorts, including colds!

I did wonder what happened last night, when it came up suspended I though I had done something wrong lol.

Kain

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Thanks Grant for all your hard work.

We had a spell last year of getting several hundred bounced e-mails to our work domains. My brother, who is wise with these things, wrote a "perl script" to mash them. I can send you a copy if it helps, though I am sure that you know what a "perl script" is, I don't BTW, and can do it easily yourself.

Thanks again for fixing it through the night, that's above and beyond the call of duty, and very much appreciated.

Captain Chaos

[Grant]

Thanks guys

CC - that was part of my fix last night, to mash the spam with a php script, similar to perl in design, I use both perl and php but these days everything is php

[GordonCopestake]

I must admit to receiving 3 newsletters... it nearly became irritating

I can see how 900 emails could raise a few flags for just "legitimate email", and the rest of the spam is just icing on the cake. Nasty spammers!

[daz]

Hmmm, I think this is the second time you've been out instead of monitoring the servers.

Very dissapointed, Mr Bowskill. This will of course be reflected in your next performance review

:)

We all know how hard you work at keeping this place up and running Grant. It is very much appreciated!!!

[Grant]

hehe, I think I need to set up some kind of automated text messaging system to tell me when something goes wrong!!! Or perhaps we could rig up some kind of giant spotlight and shine SGL into the skies over Bedfordshire....

[Jamie]

hehe, I think I need to set up some kind of automated text messaging system to tell me when something goes wrong!!! Or perhaps we could rig up some kind of giant spotlight and shine SGL into the skies over Bedfordshire....

I would just love to see ya running around trying to get into yer cape and tights

whilst seeing the SGL signal after downing 10 pints............<a href="http://www.smileycentral.com/?partner=ZSzeb008_ZNxmk696YYGB" target="_blank"><img src="http://smileys.smileycentral.com/cat/36/36_11_6.gif" alt="ROTFL" border="0"></a>

Good job mate glad your on the ball.

[daz]

Cape n tights! - he's never seen you out on a Friday!! :)

[GazOC]

Hmmm, I think this is the second time you've been out instead of monitoring the servers.

Very dissapointed, Mr Bowskill. This will of course be reflected in your next performance review

:)

We all know how hard you work at keeping this place up and running Grant. It is very much appreciated!!!

LOL!! Nice one though Grant!

[daz]

It's the Manager in me, just can't help it!!

[Grant]

no gold stars for me this week then... lol

[daz]

:)