Something wrong with boot-land.net?
I can't connect all the day.

Peter

Me too

Then there really seems to be something wrong, and it is not my network.

Peter

No its not your network. Its been down since part of yesterday August 17, 2007.

Hopefully all is well soon.
...

Let's wish the boot-land server a speedy recovery.

Been away sorry.. Will email the hosting company right now!

Maybe this post helps hard working admins, maybe they know already:

Some minutes ago I could connect to boot-land.net and found a two hours old post of medevil about 'welcome back'.

But the server still reacts randomly not successful. Sometimes I get a page, sometimes not.

Peter

I've received a resumed log from the support people - it seems to be overall lack of memory because too many requests are running at the same time on boot-land.net here's a snippet:




Flooding the site with too many simultaneous requests renders it offline, I've read the memory usage and it jumped from regular 150Mb of used RAM (we had 360Mb available) to an average 1Gb worth of simultaneous conections for this file - so I think a solution might be disabling direct links on this specific file so it can only be downloaded from the vistape site and avoid this DDoS attack.

Anyone with PHP/HTML knowledge to help us solve this menace?

A good example of this behavior can be noticed on the driverpacks webpage - it will only allow to download from the site page and if the referer is not from driverpacks it will abort.

Look here: http://driverpacks.net/DriverPacks/download.php?pag=m

All help on this case is surely welcome!

Short term solution, rename the file. Also prevent search engines from accessing it.

Y hello thar robots.txt buddy!

Same issue again?

Peter

Easy come....Easy go.

Again, the server sometimes doesn't respond.
This must be the third attack

Nuno: Can you ask your host if that happen because of many downloads? Perhaps we should let download only for registered members...

That's what I did for my site. ASP.NET, baby! Lockdowns everywhere!

Another more radical solution to spread the load and cost would be to only allow hosting of the base winbuilder packages. The other packages like VistaPE should be hosted by the creator of the package on their own web servers.

Are you telling me that Nuno was acting as a major site mirror?

Nuno hosts all boot-land.net domains

Duh! o_O

But was he attempting to be a host for all sorts of programs and plugins? The bandwidth costs alone would shut him down.

I began to think about this last week as I am hosting two servers for wb now.
Currently, the main boot-land server is producing errors on all forum requests, but projects are online.

Let me tell you a short story..

One day, a year or so ago, I go to check my email. Nuno, who I recognized from the forum here, had sent me a message explaining that he really liked some of the stuff I had provided on a small freewebs site for pe/system builders I had made. That alone made me feel very good, I knew Nuno to be quite sharp in his presentation of ideas and solutions here.
Then he goes on to tell me he would be happy to host the site, this was back when boot-land had a little more bandwidth to spare.
I knew this was something I shouldn't pass on, so I contacted him about the details. After a short time at boot-land.net, I decided to examine the proprietary winbuilder .script format. It was easy enough to manipulate with a little practice. As I began creating scripts for the OS and apps., more server space was allocated. I'm mentioning this because I know I am one of many users that Nuno has contacted, and ultimately provided server space to. Sometimes it boggles the mind.. Let me take this chance to say Thank you Nuno.
Furthermore though, I mention this because people should understand that some project providers may or may not have the resources, financial or otherwise, to host their projects for widespread use. One the other hand, There's no doubt it's time to actively seek a solution to help boot-lands main server with some of it's load. Users that wish to assist with any such efforts may certainly PM me with ideas. I encourage other project providers to ultimately take paragliders suggestion.

If VistaPE is the file causing the most problems couldn't it be moved to a site like RapidShare? It would still be available but not impacting boot-land's bandwidth. If it's active it can stay there indefinitely. Should it's activity drop in a few months it could be put back on boot-land.

I don't think that the problem is for only one file. Someone attacked boot-land.net server and maybe he will do it again by chosing a different file. Just open winbuilder and see how many files are available to download.

Maybe. If it's deliberate, probably. But if it's someone's looping script not necessarily. Moving or renaming the file is a simple and quick fix to verify the intent.


You got a direct link to that? I'm having problems.

Hi,

It's not a bandwith issue since we do have good conditions - the only problem that is impacting on boot-land.net is that too many (supposed) people are downloading a single file from a server and this jams everyone else trying to enter the site.

We had a similar event a month or two ago when the SQL database from the boot land forum showed literally thousands of people trying to enter the site which jammed the forum with error 500 messages.

Eventually we figured it was a huge ammount of bots trying to register themselves on the registration page, so disabling the queries which we're executed was enough to overcome this excess of traffic until they got tired of trying - still it took almost 9 days to fade away this annoyance.

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/Improving-...ance-t2493.html

Now we have a slimmed SQL database, optimized to support this sort of abuse - but there isn't much to do since they can very well pick any other file from any other boot-land.net subdomain, not just from vistape.

boot-land.net is now hosted on a private virtual server and memory was also increased to even bigger ram load - let's hope this is enough for the time being.

I'm still on vacations and can't stay much time online, please let me know if the forums get offline ever again.

Thank you!

Good to hear this. Do you want bots crawling your site at all? You can always just ban them. I usually run a robots.txt on my webroot every once in a while when I get more than 8 bots crawling me. It's annoying on a dialup connection and there are more of them when I'm on cable.

The approach taken by rapidshare and others is a good idea - only allow a download when a random strings of characters has been entered. The string is presented encoded in a graphic so that its hard for automatic downloading programs to detect the string.

Got a new problem at 9:00 pm MEZ

Read a post, but storing the reply timed out.

Peter

Hmm.. some time passed since last offline intervals - guess things have returned to normal!

What did you do to fix the problem(s)?

Not much, this (huge) bandwidth increase just faded away and we're back to full speed..

Right now I am getting an Internal Server Error

FWIW I just clicked the 1st posting's link and got in no problem.

Again since about 30 minutes.

Have a nice weekend w/o WB thoughts!

Peter

BTW @smiley: Your avatar seems to be stored on boot-land.net.

Your post 2 numbers above is waiting for boot-land.net ...

Here we go again...
( ouch. )


Hope things are resolved soon, last night and this morning I was unable to connect to upload a new trueimage 'lite' script.
..

Same again right now!

Peter

The problem is mySQL memory consumption going at >600Mb of RAM and the hosting provider demands a substancial increase on the monthly costs to support it.


All boot-land.net sites based on mySQL are currently jammed or work only when memory use decreases.

Those who don't require mySQL databases are completely operational - http://boot-land.net/winbuilder for example, this should also include all wb download servers.

Anyone knows good host providers that can support this level of mySQL demand at affordable rates?

Will also start optimizing the forums board to use as less ram as possible.

Maybe there is a different reason.

When I now had success to enter boot-land.net, there have heen only 26 users!

Inspite of that, clicking 'new posts' gave me the well known 'internal server error'

I think, because there are so few users, the reason cannot be an extreme high (memory) usage of mySQL server!
(Or inside the mySQL scripts there is a bug which uses much too much of memory and does not free it when finished)

Peter

Memory on the virtual server was decreased from 650Mb to 128Mb - if an average of 100 users demand around 600Mb then there is surely a lot of things that need to improved to make memory more efficient.

We have very good bandwidth conditions but mySQL is a real bugger..


Anyone around here has some experience on optimizing databases or know any good tips to read?

Try temporarely to switch off the option 'last click'.
Important: Not in 'show', but in 'store'!

Peter

Currently I tried to connect, and after a lot of trials I (randomly?) got the server.

There have been 7 guests and 1 member (me).
(means that since a long time nearly nobody was able to connect!)

A click of 'Refresh' again brought the 'server unavailable'

That cannot be a question of mySQL using too much memory!
It yes, there is really something wrong with the mySQL queries!

Peter

Got news from the hosting staff after asking to move from VPS to shared host:


Not fun being cutted off because of too much RAM use and no luck connecting throught ssh since it was all disabled and all sites were disconnected.

I've added a robots.txt file cutting off any access to any crawler from google, msn and yahoo.

Let's see how this works.

Nuno,
you accidentally double posted, I deleted second one.

Some info:
IP address: 66.249.70.108
Host name: crawl-66-249-70-108.googlebot.com
66.249.70.108 is from United States(US) in region North America

IP address: 66.249.73.188
Host name: crawl-66-249-73-188.googlebot.com
66.249.73.188 is from United States(US) in region North America

IP address: 72.190.121.20
Host name: cpe-72-190-121-20.tx.res.rr.com
72.190.121.20 is from United States(US) in region North America

More:
IP address: 89.15.80.132
Host name: ulmg-590f5084.pool.einsundeins.de
89.15.80.132 is from Germany(DE) in region Europe


IP address: 82.138.52.182
No host name is associated with this IP address or no reverse lookup is configured.
Error:Host not found
82.138.52.182 is from Russian Federation(RU) in region Europe

IP address: 87.187.44.128
Host name: p57bb2c80.dip0.t-ipconnect.de
87.187.44.128 is from Germany(DE) in region Europe

IP address: 70.135.108.241
No host name is associated with this IP address or no reverse lookup is configured.
Error:Host not found
70.135.108.241 is from United States(US) in region North America

IP address: 212.183.222.50
Host name: 212.183.222.50.dyn.user.ono.com
212.183.222.50 is from Spain(ES) in region Europe

IP address: 124.150.113.118
Host name: dsl-124-150-113-118.vic.westnet.com.au
124.150.113.118 is from Australia(AU) in region Oceana

IP address: 172.189.202.112
Host name: acbdca70.ipt.aol.com
172.189.202.112 is from United States(US) in region North America

IP address: 78.62.81.237
Host name: 78-62-81-237.ip.zebra.lt
78.62.81.237 is from Lithuania(LT) in region Europe

IP address: 91.5.178.157
Host name: p5b05b29d.dip.t-dialin.net
91.5.178.157 is from Germany(DE) in region Europe

IP address: 90.13.60.163
Host name: adijon-258-1-77-163.w90-13.abo.wanadoo.fr
90.13.60.163 is from France(FR) in region Europe

IP address: 217.26.89.3
No host name is associated with this IP address or no reverse lookup is configured.
Error:Timed out
217.26.89.3 is from Italy(IT) in region Europe

IP address: 77.248.71.99
Host name: dhcp-077-248-071-099.chello.nl
77.248.71.99 is from Netherlands(NL) in region Europe

jaclaz

So bootland is down since of yesterday
11/19/2007

Just in case it may be of any help...

After numerous tries resulting in the well known "Error 500" I got the following message:



Tim

Its a general problem with server database engines - they all like to use all of the available memory. Both Oracle and SQL server exhibit this type of behaviour. They make the assumption that you have a server dedicated to running your database.

Its usual for databases to have parameters that limit the amount of memory they consume. However the result of this memory throttling can be that your queries start getting out of memory errors so you don't gain much.

Tuning your SQL queries so that they use indexes or adding additional indexes can reduce the memory requirements of the database. If a query results in a full table scan then this consumes much more memory than an index scan.

Jaclaz, thank you for tracking the IP's.

Paraglider, I'm tring to found some documentation that explains how to improve the caching to avoid often repeated queries

At the moment I'm placing obrigatory login/password to enter on mySQL based directories:

http://boot-land.net
http://boot-land.net/forums
http://boot-land.net/wiki
http://blog.boot-land.net

Username: boot
Password: boot

This should work as a temporary way to keep crawlers away from the site and start decreasing memory usage drastically.

The host provider also agreed to give 256Mb of available RAM (previously was 150) which is burstable to 512Mb on memory peaks - hope it gives enough room to start debugging and improving the parts where memory is being eaten.

What is strange is how almost nobody is acessing any of the sites and the memory use is still around 230Mb.

Hope to bring better news soon.

Nuno, I may be completely wrong, mind you, but maybe the problem relies in the "interconnectedness of all things".

On my ("by design" slow) connection, the http://www.boot-land.net homepage has always been VERY, VERY slow, I believe because it tries to dynamically load from the wiki, last posts, and what not.

Right now I am having the (in)famous 500 error, but when I tried to login half an hour ago I succeeded only after entering (OPERA with no Wand/no remember passwors) login/pass "boot" a NUMBER of times, probably because at each step authentication was re-required for the other linked servers.

jaclaz

I may be wrong but maybe it's better to make the feature of direct connection to website every time running WinBuilder not automatic but on demand?

This was added for debugging where the memory is being used and keep away non-human visitors - it will be removed soon.

Sorry..

Everything seems to be back to normal - anyone experiencing error 500 pages while entering the site?

Will keep looking for a better solution to use mySQL.