BNA Downtime

[AUbicycles]

Thank you kindly for the notifications that BNA has been down. I am still trying to determine the source of the 'attack' which pushed the servers to capacity and offline. At the time I was also crook and offline, hence the delay in restoring service for which I apologise.

Christopher

[am50em]

Thanks for getting it running again!

[ColinOldnCranky]

It is a very much appreciated resource. And, so, very much missed when we can't get on.

Many MANY thanks for getting it up and running again.

[jasonc]

Thanks Chris

[Nobody]

It is a very much appreciated resource. And, so, very much missed when we can't get on.

+1

Thanks Christopher.

[g-boaf]

It is a very much appreciated resource. And, so, very much missed when we can't get on.

+1

Thanks Christopher.

+2

Thanks indeed.

[brumby33]

chris....when u get a chance, pls delete the thread about the downtime that i started.

cheers

brumby33

[Tim]

This forum is as near as I get to social media.
I really missed it.
Thanks for the reboot.
I even resorted to checking out our nemesis forum. That other name thieving, Coke swilling, helmet-penalty loving, close-pass permissive bunch of laydowns.
The shame.

[Zippy7]

+1 thanks for getting it back online.
Missed it over the weekend!

[Calvin27]

Mate no need to apologise. We all appreciate your (and the team?) efforts.

[CKinnard]

I'm surprised there's not greater national level defences against DOS's.....though my understanding of these things hasn't evolved in 12 years.

Makes you wonder who'd bother DOSing a cycling forum?

[g-boaf]

I'm surprised there's not greater national level defences against DOS's.....though my understanding of these things hasn't evolved in 12 years.

Makes you wonder who'd bother DOSing a cycling forum?

Maybe it's someone disaffected - paying off someone to do some sort of attack like that. It's not beyond imagination.

If it is international though, one defense would be planning your own attacks against the perpetrator states. That probably does happen already, although nothing much will ever be said about it.

[Cyclophiliac]

This forum is as near as I get to social media.
I really missed it.
Thanks for the reboot.
I even resorted to checking out our nemesis forum. That other name thieving, Coke swilling, helmet-penalty loving, close-pass permissive bunch of laydowns.
The shame.

I do hope you're referring to the organisation that hosts that forum, rather than the people who use it. I think you'll find that the members of that forum are just normal cycling-loving people, just like the BNA forum members.

[warthog1]

This forum is as near as I get to social media.
I really missed it.
Thanks for the reboot.
I even resorted to checking out our nemesis forum. That other name thieving, Coke swilling, helmet-penalty loving, close-pass permissive bunch of laydowns.
The shame.

I do hope you're referring to the organisation that hosts that forum, rather than the people who use it. I think you'll find that the members of that forum are just normal cycling-loving people, just like the BNA forum members.

I'm sure he was.
Apt description too
Thanks for getting the forum going again Christopher

[rodneycc]

Always the way when you are crook something bad happens.

Glad to see the site back up and Hope you are feeling better (health comes first!).
Cheers Rod

[10speedsemiracer]

+3 for your efforts Christopher.

Much appreciated, glad you're ok

[mikesbytes]

Bummer mate, hope your feeling better

[Derny Driver]

Good job Chris. We love this place. Thanks for keeping it going for us.

[AUbicycles]

For those interested, I believe I found the cause... a 'bad bot' called CommonCrawl.

While they claim to be good, what this did is to flood the site with so many requests... and when so many are coming through every second, it overloads the servers which can't recover and that escalates. As soon as the servers recover, the bots are there and continue to flood.

They scrape the web and provide scraped data (without cost) to anyone who wants it. In theory its a good thing for data analysts however I discovered the hard way that their bot is either poorly programmed or they operate it without any common courtesy for moderate crawling.

[Calvin27]

It was a tough few days with this and rotorburn going down. If Whirlpool went down, too I might actually have to get out and ride my bicycle!

[CKinnard]

It was a tough few days with this and rotorburn going down. If Whirlpool went down, too I might actually have to get out and ride my bicycle!

haha. was just on whirlpool this morning. my goto for tech issues.
lost my Optus mobile broadband connectivity after Linux update.
all sorted now.

[find_bruce]

I am glad to hear you are better & could sort it out Christopher. I would have offered to help but while whack-a-spammer is fine, I remain blissfully ignorant of servers etc.

[foo on patrol]

Thanks for the effort but don't let it happen again.

Foo

[AUbicycles]

Small update - I sent a short mail to the organisation who have the bot and they responded and it appears that they have now identified a bug... though the next step is to try and prevent other crawlers with this bug causing the same problems.

[mikesbytes]

Small update - I sent a short mail to the organisation who have the bot and they responded and it appears that they have now identified a bug... though the next step is to try and prevent other crawlers with this bug causing the same problems.

Do you let them back in once they have confirmed the bug is fixed?