This topic contains 13 replies, has 0 voices, and was last updated by 
-
Posts
-
Hi All,
Woke up to a hugely alarming alert from Surfnet that RE has used 9 TB of bandwidth since last night. Since our normal monthly total is only 3 TB, it is hard to see how this could be legitimate- we may have been hacked. I have shut the site off while we investigate, to prevent the bandwidth bill getting any bigger. If they charge me at the usual rate this is already likely to be a $6500 bill which is going to be fucking hard to handle.
Will post updates as soon as I have them. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, once we’ve identified what has happened. I’m really hoping it is a mistake…
Hywel.
… site should now be back up. It looks like it was an error caused by site maintenance rather than any sort of security breach or hack attack.
Sorry for what may have been an over-reaction in taking the whole site down for six hours, but if we had been bleeding bandwidth at 100 MB/sec we’d really have had a serious problem, so it seemed the sensible thing to do while we investigated.
Anyway…. normal service hopefully resumed, and say Hi to Roswell Ivory whose X Factor portfolio has just gone up!
Cheers, Hywel.
Glad to here it.
Members area does not appear to be working for me yet.
Sheep
Seems to be a time out issue that comes and goes. We’re rebooting, and investigating. Support were trying a data transfer in the background (in preparation to a move to a faster new server with bigger hard drives) and this seems to have caused several problems.
Hywel.
.. it is all up and working for me again, is it OK for you now sheep?
Hywel.
Yep, All good now.
Thanks.
Hi all,
it seems there still is a problem with the site.
I can open it only with the IE.
If I use Firefox or Chrome I get a “Server default page” (Plesk)All the best
Blackcat
I have been viewing the site in Firefox with no problems here…
Kate x
Hi ,
I have restarted my router and the computer.
Only IE can open the site. Firefox and Chrome do not.
All other websites open without any problems.Greetings from New Jersey,
Hi Hywel,
I’ve just tried getting on the site in both IE and Firefox. It’s currently just past 8:30 in the evening on the US east coast. I can get on and move around the site on both but I am seeing a quirk with the log on in that once I enter my username and password it is taking about 15 to 20 seconds to switch from the site entrance page to the member’s home page. Normally this only takes a second or three. On Firefox you see a progress box in the lower right corner slowly being filled in. Once it’s fills completely it switches to the member’s home page. With IE it first gives a waiting for the page message in the lower left corner, then quickly says “done”. Nothing happens for about another 15 seconds or so and then it kicks to the member’s home page. I first saw this about two days ago. The other odd thing was that I could not seem to log on to the forum from Firefox just now. I would enter my forum username and password and it would accept it. I’d go back to the index page, select a topic and then If I clicked on “enter a new reply” it would go back and ask me for my forum username and password again. This repeated for about three cycles. I can’t say if this is new or if it is an old issue because it’s the first time I have tried to go to the forum while using Firefox as I usually us IE. I didn’t have the same issue logging on to the forum in IE tonight.
Figured I’d pass it along.
Cheers and all the best,
Jeff
All I have to say is… holy cow.. that’s a lot of bandwidth.
Well turns out that the 9.5 TB figure is a simple error (caused by some preparations our web hosts are making to move us to a new server, which had confused the reporting software). And in fact they’ve assured me that if the overage had been caused by a hack on the site, they would have covered the bandwidth as we’ve subcontracted them to secure the site for us. Which is good to know.
But yes, even 3 TB a month is a very substantial amount of bandwidth. Which is why we have to be a bit careful (in response to another thread about it, we can’t afford to have that go to 30 TB a month, for example).
Anyway, sorry again for the site being down, but better safe than sorry. And I’d just like to say one more time that all the customer data is held on completely separate secure machines with the highest level of commercial security available.
Cheers, Hywel.
This is the most organized and well-kept site that I have seen. I am astonished that more users do not help out financially. I can help out a bit more at the end of the month. But I would like to see more people contribute financially.
Well, everyone who pays for their membership is really doing their bit financially- we really appreciate it!
Cheers, Hywel.
The forum ‘General Chat’ is closed to new topics and replies.