[rocksmyfaceoff.info]

For the handful of folks who get their email on the server: are things screwy for you, or is it just me?

Update, 1615: It’s just me.

The pruning will be postponed to next weekend. I’ve got bigger fish to fry right now, stuff directly related to the crazy sever load we saw this week. I’ll prune next weekend; this is gonna take me all night, and I have to go in to work tomorrow. [I have two program reviews and a proposal to do next week. Don't you want to be me? :)]

Evening, everyone! Hope you’re all surviving the withdrawal of the Rumor Forum.

In doing some diagnostics, I’ve found that the problem seems to be two-fold: a crazy amount of traffic on the server, aimed at an exploit. The exploit seems to be rmfo-blogs.com—which, admittedly, is behind the WordPress power curve. I’ll be correcting all that tomorrow. I’ve blocked the offending IP group hitting that exploit—it’s our Chinese friends—and the server is humming along just fine.

That doesn’t mean that the Rumor Forum still doesn’t need work … but it means that I can take it back off of Critical status and back to Needs to Be Done. [Which means I can do it next weekend.] I’m keeping the Rumor Forum down for the time being, though, until I’m sure that this is the only issue.

Doing what I have to do on rmfo-blogs.com could cause some downtime, and I’m going to make some structural changes to how rmfo-blogs is run … so things will change. Have patience, and drop me a note if need be.

Please expect downtime of the Rumor Forum through the rest of the day. We’ll accelerate our year-by-year work to get it done tonight…

Update, 11 pm CDT 14 Jun 2007: The pruning tool in SMF is not up to the task of what I’m needing to do, and the server load is too high for me to do the updates on the server. [For an example, several boards were wiped out during my attempt to prune them. Unacceptable.] I’m going to have to do this locally, and that’s going to take a lot more work. I have pulled the Rumor Forum fully offline—not even Mark and I can get into it at this point. It will stay this way for the next few days while I figure out what to do. We’re simply at a crisis point with the database, and I want to do this once and do it right and be done with it. Please have patience. –GFM

The uptime on the box was past 60 days, and given the fact that memory seemed to not be addressing properly today, I rebooted the server a few minutes ago. We should be back by midnight EDT if not far sooner. 0345 GMT: Back up!

Lots of inbound HTTP requests today … looks like a DDoS going on. Am at work and haven’t been able to pinpoint the source.