Server Troubles

[Shawn]

Hey folks,

Sorry for the server troubles this weekend.  We're still working frantically to figure out what it is that exactly happened.  The main problem is since the tech support at our co-location facility is only Monday to Friday 9 to 5pm, if we have a problem during the weekend we're pretty much screwed.  This is another reason we need to find a way to generate enough incoming funds to move to a better place.  

http://www.thedividingline.com/support.html

We'll be working this afternoon to get everything reset and restarted in time for Gruno's show tonight.  More info as it becomes available.

Take it easy all,

Shawn

[Brad]

Thanks for you hard work! I know what it is like to have a server down.

Hang in there.

[Duke]

I sure as hell missed some live music broadcast around the Duke household! But that's what we get for freeloading! C'mon, people let's bring some more money in!  

[Sim]

     'you don't miss something............'till  it ain't there!!!!'    

[Grrrl]

Thanks for your hard work guys  

I know I have been Jonesin....sheesh!!!

XOXO

Grrrl

[CarnivalMan]

Yay!  Obviously things are back to normal...aren't they?  

[Alien Love Child]

Great to see the DLBN up again.......Wow, You just don't know how much you miss something til it's gone.
Blake

[The_Lurker]

Yay! We're back!

[CarnivalMan]

As Gruno would say "Yeeeaaahhhmmmttthhhhhaaaaeeeffffffaaa!!!"  back again!

[Shawn]

Hey folks,

Well we figured out what happened, finally!  It seems that we were the victims of the evil spammers.  You always wonder where the hell all the junk mail comes from, now we know!  We suffered a direct attack through the DLBN website in which the script that we use to send us copies of the listener surveys was hacked and used to send off thousands upon thousands of spam messages to various AOL users.  The load cramped up our server until it finally couldn't handle it anymore.  So, we've taken measures to deal with the situation and are still picking up the pieces.  The station is back up and we shouldn't experience anymore problems.  Again, our apologies to all the listeners who were hoping to check some of the weekend shows.  We're doing the best we can.

Take care all,

Shawn

[Joel]

Any way to trace that? Does your ISP, police, or Canadian Government get involved in these sort of attacks?

[Grrrl]

The Underdog Prog archive is now up from this last Saturday....for those of you that tried to listen, thanks for staying and keeping me company  

Check it out and you can hear The Fountain of Lamneth without 20 million pauses....

YAY BISHIE AND FRIENDS!!!!!!

Grrrl

[Shawn]

Any way to trace that? Does your ISP, police, or Canadian Government get involved in these sort of attacks?

Nope.. believe it or not the offending message only went through our forms once or twice.  The generating of all the emails was done on our server so there's no way to tell the difference between the exploit and a legitimate request.

[Frans]

There wouldn't be batches of 1000s of legitimate requests in a row from the same IP...

[Shawn]

There was only 3 or 4 actual calls that came in.  Somehow the peal script was exploited to send out an email with hundreds of addresses via bcc.  So we have no way of knowing which one the offending request was as we get hundreds of legitimate calls to that script per day.