StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Did anyone notice that the board was unreachable there for about 2 minutes? between 6:48 and 6:50 CST? Not sure if it was just my work comp freaking out or the internet.

I was getting a SQL "General Error" for a couple of minutes tonight.

I forgot to copy what the exact error code it was mentioning, unfortunately.

Same problem here I dunno what's causing it but it is presisting.

Just like SCRawl posted:

SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (11) [2002]

And this is the second outage in a few hours for me.

Me too on the my Sql last night

I was having on and off again SQL errors last night and all morning.

I'm trying to figure out what this is. In the meantime, I've disabled robots and spiders in robots.txt, in case that was the problem.

well this is the first time I've been here since late friday.

So for reasons I can not begin to imagine, I get a 500 server error anytime I try to post or even preview a post in N&P. Yet it seems elsewhere I can post fine and other people can post to N&P fine as well.

WTF?

It might have been a coincidence. Someone identified a weakness in the phpbb3 software and used it to begin attacking our site a few days ago, thanks in part to the fact that the server doesn't have a whole lot of RAM on it (yet) and can be easily overloaded through this technique. It's possible that you just happened to try to post in N&P when he was launching these attacks, which came and went.

A server hardware upgrade is coming, thanks in large part to one absurdly generous user (I should ask him if he wants his identity known).

AdmiralKanos wrote:It might have been a coincidence. Someone identified a weakness in the phpbb3 software and used it to begin attacking our site a few days ago, thanks in part to the fact that the server doesn't have a whole lot of RAM on it (yet) and can be easily overloaded through this technique. It's possible that you just happened to try to post in N&P when he was launching these attacks, which came and went.

Nope. It actually just seems to be the one thread. As I test I tried to post there again, got the 500 error. So I tried a new post in N&P and previewed, it worked fine. Went to another N&P thread, previewed a reply, it worked. I go back to the original thread, try to preview my reply...and I get a 500 error. Yet other people have been posting replies to that thread since I started getting the errors, so it just seems to be me for some reason.

At least when I tried copy/pasting my old message. I just rewrote another one (even shorter than my last two attempts, *sigh*) and it actually worked. So maybe there was something odd with the message or it was too long or something? I really have no idea what the deal was. But the problem seems to have passed.

EDIT: So I still had the text of the message giving me problems saved in a Notepad file and decided to preview it in Testing. Sure enough, a 500 server error. So it must have had something to do with the text of the message itself for some reason... The only thing different about it is that I had copy/pasted some text from a PDF file. When I took just that text out...it worked! So for whatever reason it was the text from the PDF that seemed to be causing issues. I have no idea why; it was eventually saved as a Notepad file and taken from there, surely that would have done away with any anti-copying code? I didn't even know PDFs could do that in the first place.

But that seems to have been the issue. Weird.

EDIT2: Okay, it was the quotation marks. They look different than the ones I see when I press the key. Replacing those fixed it. I guess that particular font for quotation marks or whatever that was translated over from the PDF made phpBB very unhappy.

Just tried to start a new thread here in Off-Topic, and got a blank page each time. Saving it as a draft worked but previewing didn't.

Having trouble replying to threads. Same error as above; blank white page.

EDIT: Trying the same thing in Chrome yields a 500 error. Only seems to occur to some threads (obviously).

That might be the PHP memory limit. The default PHP memory limit used to be 16MB per process, but it was raised to 128MB in recent years. I dropped it back down to 16MB during the recent attacks because that seemed to lessen the impact, but I can increase it to 32MB and see if that helps. Let me know if the problem persists.

Posted successfully. The change does seem to have helped.

RogueIce nailed it. It's probably related to the PHP Magic Quotes function. Mike made a change that I think borked it, so in the meantime if you see funky-looking contextual quotes, change them to straight quotes.

EDIT: Issues appear to be resolved. Anyone else?

Did Mike just restore from a backup or something? I'm getting SSL cert errors that say it expired on 03/21/12.

Also, the SD banner at the top of every page goes to the forum instead of the main site.

I'm having no such problems. Maybe it will help if you clear your history for the site, along with the cookies and cache?

Dominus Atheos wrote:Did Mike just restore from a backup or something? I'm getting SSL cert errors that say it expired on 03/21/12.

The certificate has been saying it expired since that day for me.

Dominus Atheos wrote:Did Mike just restore from a backup or something? I'm getting SSL cert errors that say it expired on 03/21/12.

Also, the SD banner at the top of every page goes to the forum instead of the main site.

What theme are you using?

I'll let Mike know about the certificate.

Subsilver2

Had about a ten minute hiccup of being unable to access the board, lost a post in the process.

Ahriman238 wrote:Had about a ten minute hiccup of being unable to access the board, lost a post in the process.

That sounds like a networking issue. Those happen occasionally.

I'm not sure if this actually counts as a bug or not, but some of the topics I've posted in don't have dots marked on them indicating I posted in them.

I've got posts in the circumcision thread, but there's no dot indicating as much. Everything else is properly dotted.