Quicksand Fans

For the past several days I have had trouble connecting to the server for this forum. When I try, the browser will sit there and after several minutes say the the connection was terminated while loading the page. I've tried this with IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. The only way I seem to be able to connect right now is through a proxy. Is the server blocking connections from certain areas?

Thanks,
Seprater

seprater wrote:For the past several days I have had trouble connecting to the server for this forum. When I try, the browser will sit there and after several minutes say the the connection was terminated while loading the page. I've tried this with IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. The only way I seem to be able to connect right now is through a proxy. Is the server blocking connections from certain areas?

Thanks,
Seprater

Dave already has a theory about why some people are having trouble accessing the site lately, and mentions it in this thread.

Thanks. That does sound like a possible culprit.

Seprater

seprater wrote:Thanks. That does sound like a possible culprit.

Seprater

I think in this case Dave's theory is correct. I check a website that reports on the concurrent health of the Internet and there were several major outages, one in Anaheim, due to a DDoS attack. However, any time the symptom is that you can connect initially and then lose the connection when changing pages, especially if the failure takes you to the login page, something to check is your system's time of day clock. If that is off, as it can be if your internal battery runes down (or right after the change to Daylight Savings Time) it may cause the cookies set by the forum to expire.

Yea, this almost certainly seems to be a result of the Spamhaus attack. Here are a couple articles about it -

http://arstechnica.com/information-tech ... struction/

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/ ... er_dangers

These articles are very techy, and even with my networking background, I found them hard to follow all the way through. But the long and short of it is that they explain the spotty nature of how some folks have been unable to access QSF properly.

The troubling news is that they don't even mention how, or even if, repairs are being made to the currently effected DNS servers.

Haven't had trouble with these boards *knocks on wood* But several other places I frequent had massive slowdowns at various points during the week (including the usual suspect that often goes slow during DDOS attacks) due to this. Also some people I know have mentioned a dramatic uptick in Spam in their inboxes.

BSink42 wrote:Haven't had trouble with these boards *knocks on wood* But several other places I frequent had massive slowdowns at various points during the week (including the usual suspect that often goes slow during DDOS attacks) due to this. Also some people I know have mentioned a dramatic uptick in Spam in their inboxes.

I don't know about spam, but the long and short of all this is that ISPs and anyone else running a DNS server needs to look at their systems, fix the corruption/damage, and then make sure they don't let themselves be impacted by future attacks.

This means that people who can't hit certain sites will not be fixed all at the same time. And, depending on the smugness of their ISP's, it could be quite a while for some folks.

Meanwhile, they could configure their browsers to use alternate DNs servers, or activate the ones in their own routers.

By whatever means it appears that some of us have just come back online.

Duncan Edwards wrote:By whatever means it appears that some of us have just come back online.

Well then, welcome back.
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