AvCanada finally restored and functional once again

[avcanada]

Well that took a long time and I appologize for the delay. This particular issue could not be repaired via the normal method.

Please let me know if you encounter any issues the next few hours.

[digits_]

Everything seems to work but loads very slowly.

[dontcallmeshirley]

It seems that phpBB isn't as robust as it used to be.

[redlaser]

Feb 18, it crashed on me today when trying to go in page two of the jobs section,

[MOAB]

All these ads helping to keep this site running or what?

[pelmet]

Pprune never crashes. It would interesting to know the difference.

[avcanada]

Back up and running. Appologzie for the delay had two flights today. Thank you for the hundreds of emails letting me know the table crashed again. Again it did not repair via the normal method and took a lot longer to fix.

[digits_]

Back up and running. Appologzie for the delay had two flights today. Thank you for the hundreds of emails letting me know the table crashed again. Again it did not repair via the normal method and took a lot longer to fix.

Something might still be afoot. Making a post is significantly slower than normal. Even loading topics isn't as smooth as it used to be.

[avcanada]

hopefully third time is the charm

[DanWEC]

Sure looks like an ongoing DDoS attack.

[digits_]

hopefully third time is the charm

It's been slowing down again significantly this morning. A sign of more trouble to come?

[CaptDukeNukem]

Sure looks like an ongoing DDoS attack.

I was thinking the same thing.

[Me262]

Sure looks like an ongoing DDoS attack.

There were 12k "visitors", so pretty much

[7ECA]

Site continues to be quite janky today, very slow loading times - being logged out randomly, etc. Maybe it's time for an upgrade to a newer forum platform?

[Chaxterium]

It's definitely not restored and functional. I'm getting "General Error" about 50% of the time and even when it does work it takes much much longer than normal for pages to load.

[CaptDukeNukem]

I’m pretty sure avcanada would get a few donations to upgrade their forums if required. I’d certainly toss in some of my per diems

[Inverted2]

It’s still not working very good. Crashes half the time…..very slow to load.

[Dronepiper]

I’m pretty sure avcanada would get a few donations to upgrade their forums if required. I’d certainly toss in some of my per diems

Your kidding right? This place makes money running a billion ads.

[avcanada]

Added serveral internatioal bots to the .htaccess file and so far seems to have helped reduce the massive number of connections. Working the problem.

[CpnCrunch]

If you host on OVH (including their cloud servers), you get DDoS protection included for free. I've used it for many years, and it works great. You also don't have to pay for outgoing or incoming bandwidth.

[pelmet]

There have been several occasions when I visited the site when there were several similar Russian sounding names showing as also on the forum. Always together. Anybody else see that?

[DanWEC]

I doubt Russian hackers would have any desire to take down avcanada, there's no value or utility, but sure seems like either a brute force or ddos attack.
Ddos is intentional and targeted purely for disruption, so someone would have to have an axe to grind.
Brute force is also targeted, trying to log in as an owner or admin to gain information access. Given there's no personal or pay info here I wonder if someone really wants to see IP addresses of some users. There's definitely some weirdos and beef here. Could even be someone involved with an operator.

Just remember, nothing is truly anonymous when you volunteer your thoughts and information online!

[BadRobot]

It's still really slow today. Depending on how much control you have on your server here are a few things you should do :

• If you can use sudo/su commands, I would advise you to use iptables as it will block the attacks directly from a network point of view. The .htaccess does not prevent the denial of service from running, it just prevent them from accessing the pages and running the php scripts.
• A second step would be to change your DNS configuration to put the forum behind a service such as Cloudflare, it would also mitigate the DDos attacks. It might require you to put SSL on the website (which would be great ), you can do that easily and for free using certbot and let's encrypt.
• Finally you also could put a WAF (Web Application Firewall) that could stop a few attacks.

If you need some help you can pm me, I've got a bit of experience in server administration and I would be happy to help

[avcanada]

Latest changes seem to be working well.

[BadRobot]

Latest changes seem to be working well.

Indeed, it's working well right now.