GG Inc. Down

For those 12 or so people who care - gginc.co.nz is down for the time being for excessive bandwidth usage. Somehow, in the 12 or so hours since I last used the site, it sucked down no less that 1417GB of bandwidth. Yes, you read correct, 1417GB. For a site that regulary does somewhere in the region of 800MB - to 1GB a month, this is somewhat out of character.

It may be a server glitch or a hack attempt, I don't know yet. If it's the former then I should be running again within 12 hours, if it's the latter then I'll probably be out for the rest of the month.

Holy cow! I was wondering why it wasn't working.

Hmmm...hope its up soon.

Big yikes...

Now for the question on everyone's (well maybe just me) mind... what is gginc.co.nz?

It's his homepage.

It could have been a bot set to start fucking with crap, downloading stuff, etc. You'd better check into that.

EDIT - Angry, misdirected outburst removed.

I'll be able to get back online before the end of the month, but it'll take quite a bit of work. I'll post here when I'm up and running again.

Why would they need to transfer all that data?

DarkWolf said:

Why would they need to transfer all that data?

To piss people off and to wreck stuff. What else would a moron do?

DarkWolf said:

Why would they need to transfer all that data?

A buggy robot thrown into an infinite loop could easily do that. I doubt they had malicious intentions, but that's beside the point.

Three words :

Threaten a lawsuit

A runaway process, that sucks.

1417 gigs? gzip'ed?

ouch

Probably not. You can send a HTTP request that will cause a server to send a standard page, and I think most robots do this (I know Google does).

Heh, we've had a bunch of these stupid things hitting these forums over the last month or so. I banned their entire IP range but they still got in O_o

Lüt said:

Heh, we've had a bunch of these stupid things hitting these forums over the last month or so. I banned their entire IP range but they still got in O_o

If the Powers That Be (tm) have bandwidth concerns, the best thing to do would be to put a robots.txt file into the site's public_html directory that disallows all robots from the forums.

Telefragged doesn't have any concerns, I just got sick of seeing 10-20 "guests" logged in under the same IP range doing things like reporting posts, sending email and searching forums.

I still find it hard to believe that a couple of bots could have transferred 1.4 Terabytes of information from one site over a span of...well, how many days was this happening?

Bloodshedder said:

I still find it hard to believe that a couple of bots could have transferred 1.4 Terabytes of information from one site over a span of...well, how many days was this happening?

Not days. Hours. I discovered it about 12 hours after I last used the site. I can't believe it either. It just doesn't make sense.

I'm looking at the log right now, and while the bot pinpointed by the tech support did do a top-to-bottom index of the site, there is no signs of the repetitive access from anyone needed to generate the level of bandwidth the system is claiming. Heh, so apologies to the turnitin.com guys. Looks like a server glitch and incompetent tech support are the culprits.

Darn, how many active review pages are there actually left?

Joel, any dates when you'll be back up and running? And commiserations btw :(

Anal Cunt were right, Technology IS gay

Man, that sucks :( Hopefully you'll be back up and running soon.

Lüt said:

Heh, we've had a bunch of these stupid things hitting these forums over the last month or so. I banned their entire IP range but they still got in O_o

It's teh Bin Laden and his evil gangs of henchmen (and henchwomen).

Mordeth said:

Man, that sucks :( Hopefully you'll be back up and running soon.

Thanks brother. And hurry up and answer my e-mails dammit ;)

Joel, any dates when you'll be back up and running? And commiserations btw :(

Thanks and no. I've still got FTP access so I'm going to start pulling down the files I don't have offline (forum config info and stuff). Since I'm the server admin, I can trash the account and recreate it, nullifying the overblown bandwidth usage. The files aren't everything, there's lots of fiddly crap that needs to be done like setting up subdomains, restoring databases and stuff. Probably at least 24 hours before I can get it all done (counting work, bathing and all that other crap).

Everything's running again now guys. Seems it was caused by a bug in the CPanel control software. One of the tech guys came up with a workaround that prevented me from having to trash the account.

thank god, I was suffering withdrawl...

/me twitches