- This topic has 29 replies, 12 voices, and was last updated Jan 4-11:59 pm by Brian Masinick.
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argonaut459
Good evening,
more something general I witnessed over the last few weeks. This forum tends to lagg somehow.On my Cellphone, using Opera mobile 71.3
it freezes the browser everytime I’m posting something. Meaning, about 4 or 5 sentences in, the browser freezes. I can still type and after a minute or so the typed input gets written. After that it works normal again.
Using “Force dark site” with this browserOn the Dell laptop using Epiphany browser:
I can’t scroll down past the News section of the forum. Epiphany just locks up and won’t work, while CPU is running at roughly 80%Dell Laptop using Falkon:
Everything works, though the color scheme makes it hard to differentiate between forums, posts, stickies and single comments.
A dark mode, would probably help.ModdIt
Hi argo*,
agree on forum being often very laggy, Mr Masinik already posted
about denial of service attacks so maybe that is root cause.Who is attacking, my guess is it comres from right wing and or extreme right.
Probably due the extremely positive stance of anticapitalista and the statements
on site.
Brian Masinick
Yeah, I just looked at our log and we have had quite a few spam attacks this week. Even as I was cleaning out some old log records, more were coming in; we’ve endured at least one, possibly more than one 503 “outage” that was almost certainly related to the attacks I was just reviewing.
Between the Web site management and the antiX spam software, we are managing, but it IS affecting our forum quality of service; short of more expensive and powerful servers and equally powerful and capable thwarting tools, we’re stuck with what we have. Contributions toward improving equipment and resources would undoubtedly be met with appreciation, but that is between potential donors and the owners of the forum and the equipment.
- This reply was modified 5 months, 1 week ago by Brian Masinick.
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Brian Masinickargonaut459
That is very unfortunate.
However I’m not sure these are related, as it only happens on phone and with the browsers mentioned in the OP.Hi argo* I can assure i have lag problems quite often, no matter which device or browser
is used. Denial of service, syn flooding, Brute force login attempts are a pain no matter how
powerful servers are.
Many sites are suffering same here in EU. Attacks strongly intensified after the EU commission
condemned the invasion of Ukraine by pootins troops.argonaut459
Didn’t realize it’s this bad.
Brian Masinick
In two of my positions near the end of my career I worked in and with corporate security teams at two financial firms.
It’s expensive and time consuming but there are indeed ways to effectively thwart the very best network storms, hacks, you name it. The best firms have a fortress around their entire network that’s, in itself as powerful as any systems we’ve ever used. Even this equipment is redundant and has constantly updated tools and it uses both hardware and software to combat these issues.
Even then there’s some exposure but it is remarkable how rapidly they are able to respond and protect themselves from exposure, even if they have been penetrated because of redundancy, the ability to reroute their traffic and many other techniques we’d only dream of.
It’s a constant battle but billions of dollars can do a lot to mitigate problems.
Between these well to do companies and network security companies with a lot to gain too there are places that have pretty good success against these intrusions.--
Brian MasinickBrian Masinick
We took a pretty big hit with a somewhat extended outage that only ended a few moments ago…
Tue 29 Nov 2022 04:07:10 PM EST--
Brian Masinick
rokytnji
Noticed myself we were offline for a bit.
Sometimes I drive a crooked road to get my mind straight.
Not all who Wander are Lost.
I'm not outa place. I'm from outer space.Linux Registered User # 475019
How to Search for AntiX solutions to your problemsBrian Masinick
Noticed myself we were offline for a bit.
Nothing a “few billion dollars can’t fix”. Oh, that’s right, most of us are either retired, poor, or financially limited in one way or another.
At least our SOFTWARE is quite reliable; no software problems other than spotty forum availability. Besides, the spammers who infiltrate our systems find a few unsuspecting people and launch their attacks from systems all over the world. The spammers don’t have unlimited resources either; apparently they do have enough time and motivation to wreak havoc wherever they can, in hopes of locating a hole in the security; then while we’re trying to fix one area, they’re attacking another; that’s what I learned in my financial services software security testing. With several years since some of those gigs, the bad guys have undoubtedly come up with entirely new generations of their classic tricks, but certain things remain the same: find weak links, then use them to exploit more lucrative targets. I’m sure we’re not a primary DIRECT target, but we could be a launching point for intermediate attacks if they find any attack vectors in which they can enter our server infrastructure or get into our system via insecure accounts.
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Brian Masinick
Wallon
Thanks Brian for the explanation.
I also received the code 503 on my smartphone and computers when I tried to open the link to the antiX forum.All Belgians who use Whatsapp are on the darknet now. Very difficult even for a company to resist hackers…
stevesr0
Hi all,
I had a forum page open on my browser, refreshed and got a 503. After several retries, I launched a new page and that went thru and is working.
stevesr0
@1744 Eastern Time
techore
I had the same experience in the last hour. Was posting and lost the post. After several attempts, gave up then returned ten minutes later and it was working.
argonaut459
Well, these don’t sound like the issue I have.
I only got the freezer while typing a longer message on phone, and the not able to scroll using epiphany.
Have to test other pages with epiphany, though duck duck go results scroll fine.A shame that a forum for a Linux distro has to deal with such issues.
Sad world :'(Brian Masinick
@argonaut459: These “issues” described above do not happen ALL the time, but there are certain times when the intruders tend to strike, and recently they’ve been trying to create “network storms”, in an apparent effort to either take us down and reduce the availability of our services, or to attempt other forms of intrusion, or both.
I don’t have the kind of tools at my disposal that the network engineers have at major financial service institutions and other enterprises with DEEP pockets to spend and protect their services, ranging from an entire firewall around the borders between their internal network and the global network, sophisticated network intrusion detection, collection, prevention, and avoidance devices and more; all I have available here are a few anti SPAM logs to indicate the positive posts entered on our forum and the rejected posts from anti SPAM detection; that’s it.
That’s why so much of what I’m discussing here, while based on my past industry experience, is to a large degree speculative, because I only have a “peek” at what’s actually going on. I don’t know how many MB or GB per second our network provides, I don’t know the detailed statistics of how many posts per hour we receive, though there are a few tools that give us a rough idea about some of that.
Consider yourself fortunate if you’ve been able to access the forum at times when the network traffic is reasonable and you’re able to read and respond to content. It SEEMS to be OK right now too, but no idea if that will be the case today or not.
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Brian Masinick
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