Why did HA go offline?

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Winston
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by Winston »

Btw everyone. I got a warning in my hosting panel that we are not using an SSL certificate. That's what usually encrypts an e-commerce site that takes credit cards, for safety and privacy, and it redirects http in the URL to https. I heard that it's not just for e-commerce sites anymore. All sites are expected to have it now, according to Google. Why?

Does anyone know how to set this up? If I set up an SSL certificate, will all my links and subpages need to be manually changed to https? Or is there a way to automatically redirect every http page to https so that no hyper links need to be changed?

@xiongmao and @fschmidt any idea?

Would this help stop the server from crashing too? Or is it unrelated? Are hackers taking advantage of the fact that we are still using http?

Update:

Bluehost support gave me this code to use in the htaccess file of the server root to automatically redirect my home page from http to https. I'm gonna post it below for reference. But will this redirect all subpages as well? Anybody know?
Yes, Winston. SSL is already installed.
You can add the below Force HTTPS code in .htaccess file. When you access the site using HTTP, it will automatically redirect to HTTPS.

Code: Select all

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} happierabroad\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.happierabroad.com/$1 [R,L]
@xiongmao and @fschmidt any idea?
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Winston
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by Winston »

Just did an SSL scan for this site. I got a B grade. See below. Not bad huh? lol. Not sure what this means though. Doesn't it mean my server is fairly ok?

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze ... abroad.com

Another site to analyze the SSL on your site:

https://www.whynopadlock.com/
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Winston
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by Winston »

Update:

Ok I just purchased add on resources for our server from Bluehost. I added one extra CPU core for a total of 3 CPU cores. And 2 more GB RAM for a total of 4 GB RAM running our server. Hopefully, that will stop the crashing for now. Keep your fingers crossed.
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fschmidt
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by fschmidt »

Google pushes SSL because Google is evil and loves pointless complexity. Using SSL will do nothing but increase your resource requirements. You shouldn't use SSL.

Your hosting service is run by morons if they can't identify what resource you need (CPUs or RAM or whatever). I am not a sysadmin, but any reasonable sysadmin can easily identify the problem.
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Winston
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by Winston »

How does SSL work exactly? Won't Google penalize your site ranking somewhat for not using SSL, like it claims it will?

Btw everyone, it looks like increasing the RAM and resources of the server worked. The server is no longer crashing. Has it crashed at all in the last few days? Has it ever gone down temporarily? The forum sometimes goes down for a while, I notice, if there's too many database connections, but that is only temporary. Have you guys noticed that too?
Check out my FUN video clips in Russia and SE Asia and Female Encounters of the Foreign Kind video series and Full Russia Trip Videos!

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flowerthief00
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by flowerthief00 »

SSL just encrypts data transfers between your site so that it is harder for hackers to steal data or inject malicious code. Yes, Google will penalize you for not using SSL. I would just use it.

Many hosts today make the process of setting up SSL trivially easy, like a simple switch you can turn on from your control panel.
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Winston
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by Winston »

flowerthief00 wrote:
September 1st, 2019, 10:04 pm
SSL just encrypts data transfers between your site so that it is harder for hackers to steal data or inject malicious code. Yes, Google will penalize you for not using SSL. I would just use it.

Many hosts today make the process of setting up SSL trivially easy, like a simple switch you can turn on from your control panel.
Even if installing SSL is easy, what about the process of changing all URLs from http to https? Is that automatic? Can all URLs be redirected? Theres no way to change thousands of internal links in the forum. I could use replace text software to change the rest of the site though. How does that work. I guess I'll have to do research on it.
Check out my FUN video clips in Russia and SE Asia and Female Encounters of the Foreign Kind video series and Full Russia Trip Videos!

Join my Dating Site to meet thousands of legit foreign girls at low cost!

"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
fschmidt
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by fschmidt »

Winston wrote:
September 1st, 2019, 3:22 pm
Won't Google penalize your site ranking somewhat for not using SSL, like it claims it will?
It's only a matter of time before Google penalizes your site ranking for not worshipping Satan. Will you worship Satan to improve your site ranking?
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flowerthief00
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by flowerthief00 »

Winston wrote:
September 2nd, 2019, 5:19 am
Even if installing SSL is easy, what about the process of changing all URLs from http to https? Is that automatic? Can all URLs be redirected? Theres no way to change thousands of internal links in the forum. I could use replace text software to change the rest of the site though. How does that work. I guess I'll have to do research on it.
Are the URLs on the site all absolute links? That would be surprising. Normally you shouldn't have to change all the URLs.
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Winston
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by Winston »

For reference purposes, here are the emails that were sent to me from Bluehost case managers about the reason that this site and forum crashed simultaneously, based on their investigation. Does what they say indicate a DDOS attack? If so, how can one block or counteract or prevent it in the future?
Hello,

Thank you for your patience while we worked to investigate your server issues . We certainly regret your recent experience as well as our delay in reaching back out to you.

At this point in time we are showing that your server and control panel is functioning properly and all services are u p and running.

We would like to note that we are showing that there was a heavy increase of traffic of IP's belonging to http://huaweicloud.com which appears to be a hosting provider in Beijing. It appears that this increase in traffic ended around 4:50AM UTC on the 19th which translates to 9:50PM on the 18th.

Additionally we have been able to repair all phpbb_search_wordlist and phpbb_posts tables on all 3 of your PHPBB databases without error. If you are still experiencing any problems however please provide additional information so that we can continue our investigation.

In the meantime, do not hesitate to reach back out to us if you have any additional questions or concerns. Also, please feel free to take the survey by clicking the button at the bottom of the email. We would greatly appreciate your feedback.

Thanks,
Richie J.
Hello Winston,

Thank you for reaching back out to us. We sincerely apologize for the troubles that you have been experiencing with your forum. We attempted to call the number on file, and were told you were not available.

When we began our investigation on the 20th it was unclear as to the scope of your problems beyond the error message you were receiving inside your control panel, and the crashed tables.

By the time we started looking into the matter on the 20th there were no crashed tables and the forum appeared to be functioning as it should when we visited http://www.happierabroad.com/forum/. We do truly regret that tables crashed leading to the loss of content. It is tragic to have lost the data you and your visitors had put into the site.

It appears that your server is not currently configured to make backups. You or your administrator might have chosen to do this due to the lack of space on your drive, which is understandable, however, does leave your sites to this type of risk.

The crashed tables were most likely precipitated by the heavy server load caused by the increase in traffic you have been receiving as of late. We actually noticed really heavy server loads during our investigation. Having been able to monitor your server during this heavy load, we were able to see the same thing that was reported in our last email to you.

You can see an example of your server's heavy loads from today below:

Sep 20 (UTC) runq-sz plist-sz ldavg-1 ldavg-5 ldavg-15
10:10:15 AM 379 1211 400.04 341.91 214.05
10:20:07 AM 407 1045 403.36 395.73 303.37
10:30:05 AM 380 1202 400.98 408.51 354.46
10:40:04 AM 402 1220 408.10 410.69 381.83
10:50:06 AM 417 1050 397.55 405.69 393.50
11:00:05 AM 378 1203 399.75 333.34 339.02
11:10:07 AM 296 1180 408.75 395.73 369.91
11:20:08 AM 334 1216 399.81 390.75 379.24
11:30:03 AM 415 1052 411.46 408.97 394.52
11:40:23 AM 348 1212 403.19 404.69 398.78
11:50:06 AM 217 1232 409.11 404.19 400.63
12:00:01 PM 8 426 205.68 352.08 385.23


The site was receiving thousands of hits to your PHP service, primarily from IP's beginning in 159.138.*, which comes from what appears to be a Huawei hosting company. We blackholed this IP range on your server for a period of time to allow for the server load to go down. The server returned to normal levels though it did cause some for your tables to crash again, which have since been repaired.

We removed the blackhole in the event that you are expecting this traffic from these ranges of IP's. If you feel this traffic to be malicious in nature you can request that we block the IP range, or additionally you can also blackhole the IP range by running the following command as the root user:

root@server.happierabroad.com [~]# ip route add blackhole 159.138.0.0/16

As you mentioned in your recent contact with us you are looking to restore your database from a backup. As you or your administrator had the backups disabled, there are no server generated backups to restore from.

If you have any manually created backups to restore from please let us know right away and we would be more than happy to assist you in getting your database backup restored.

Going Forward we strongly urge you to either add additional storage to be mounted to /backup so that you can start utilizing the automatic backups provided by your server's cPanel software -or- manually backup your databases and files periodically, downloading them to a local location.

You can easily download a backup of your databases from within your control panel:

User-added image
User-added image

If you do decide to purchase additional storage you can enable your backups from within your WHM panel:

User-added image

Once enabled to can set your configuration:

User-added image

We have scoured through your server to find any random backup you might had made at some point prior to the table crash. We were unable to find any to speak of. Again, in the event you have your own backup we would love to help you in any way we can to help you restore your database.

In the meantime, please feel free to contact us if there are any additional questions or concerns There is also a survey at the bottom of the email.

Regards,
Richie J.
Later they resolved the case with this email, fortunately:
Hi Winston,

Thank you so much for reaching back out to us. We are so grateful for your patience while we worked to recover a backup of your database, happier2_HappierAbroad.

Though typically not possible nor feasible for us to recover backup images for our virtual private servers, our system operations team has gone above and beyond and spent the past 3 days looking for any remnants of a backup of your server's image from before September 18th.

We are pleased to report that they were able to find a backup from September 13th and extract your happier2_HappierAbroad database from it. This backup is currently imported into a database called happier2_phpbbbackup on your virtual private server. There is also a backup found at /root/happier2_HappierAbroad.tgz

We temporarily modified your /home/happier2/public_html/forum/config.php file to connect to the happier2_phpbbbackup database and your posts appeared as they should. Feel free to connect your PHPBB installation to the new database to restore your posts.

We do strongly advise either downloading manual backups of your sites and databases on a frequent bases. Alternatively you could also remove any content from your drive that is not needed or purchase additional storage and mount it to /backup to take advantage of the automatic backups afforded to our VPS and Dedicated customers.

You can purchase a drive by using the addons tab of your control panel:

Once purchased please take advantage of our support to assist you in getting the drive mounted and your server's backup system configured to help you avoid being put in this situation in the future.

In the meantime, do not hesitate to reach back out to us if there are any other question or concerns you have. Please also feel free to take the survey mentioned at the bottom of the email.

Thanks,
Richie J.
Check out my FUN video clips in Russia and SE Asia and Female Encounters of the Foreign Kind video series and Full Russia Trip Videos!

Join my Dating Site to meet thousands of legit foreign girls at low cost!

"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
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Winston
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by Winston »

Update:

Good news. I've gotten the automated backup program I installed to work. It seems to work fine so far. I've set it to make a backup of the forum every 3 days, and store a total of 3 backups in the server. I guess that means that each new backup will overwrite the oldest backup on the server. That would be a logical assumption. This way, if the forum were to crash and lose all the posts again, I can restore it using one of the three backups stored on the server. And should the most recent backup occur right after the crash and loss of data, thus rendering it useless, or I find out about the crash too late, there will still be two other backups that I can restore from from 3 and 6 days ago. I think that's a good system to follow, don't you all agree?

So this is good. I don't have to take the burden and responsibility of having to make manual backups every three days, which I don't have time for, since modern life contains so many distractions and neverending lists of things to do, especially while you're traveling. Instead, this program will do it automatically for me, based on the settings I give it, and store it in the server safely and securely. That way we can make sure that a recent backup is available in the worst case scenario. Cool. I will send a donation to the developer of this program.

It also solves the problem I mentioned before about how our hosting space is not enough for enabling automated backups of my site, via my webhost panel, because it would backup the whole site, not just the forum, and that would take way too much space, requiring me to purchase additional storage space. With this third party backup tool, I can just backup the forum database, rather than the whole site, because that's all I need really, since the rest of the site consists of static pages mostly that I have a copy of offline.

Plus, this backup tool I'm using also compresses the forum backups into a gzip file, so that each backup only takes up approximately 150 MB of space, which is quite small, and so I can easily afford to store 3 backups of such a size, using up only about 450 MB of storage space.

Also, I found a way to reduce the size of the forum database significantly. By deleting the native search index, and using the SQL search index instead, it reduces the database by about one entire gigabyte! That's a lot. I never knew that the search index backend using native text, took up so much space. The developers told me in the support forum that using the SQL search index is just as efficient and takes up far less space than the standard native text index. So I did just that and now our forum database is a lot smaller now. This means the forum is a lot easier to backup and store too, without trouble or time outs from handling big files. So that's another definite plus.

Anyway, I hope all is smooth sailing here from now on, and we can all rest assured and sleep better knowing that this forum has regular stable back ups from now on. I guess we learned a lesson from this crash after all, about how to protect data properly, especially on a board as large as this one. :)

Btw if any of you have a phpbb forum too and want to use the backup tool I mentioned above, here's the link to download it: https://github.com/david63/autodbbackup/archive/3.2.zip
Check out my FUN video clips in Russia and SE Asia and Female Encounters of the Foreign Kind video series and Full Russia Trip Videos!

Join my Dating Site to meet thousands of legit foreign girls at low cost!

"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
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Cornfed
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by Cornfed »

And this time? BTW, please make an effort to keep the forum up - it contains many classic posts. Also, please make a copy of it for posterity.
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Yohan
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by Yohan »

Cornfed wrote:
December 10th, 2019, 12:46 am
And this time? BTW, please make an effort to keep the forum up - it contains many classic posts. Also, please make a copy of it for posterity.
Yes, true, again this forum was gone for a while. Hopefully in future there are full backups available in case something in the database is damaged.
HappyGuy

Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by HappyGuy »

Cornfed wrote:
December 10th, 2019, 12:46 am
And this time?
Winston dropped his laptop in the shower again, no big deal.

And here's video of his server room
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Winston
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Re: Did HA go offline?

Post by Winston »

This time it was because our server space ran out of room. I'm not sure what's taking up so much space in the server. There should be 20 percent of the server space free. Apparently something is taking up that space now. I can't find out what it is. I looked in the file manager and found nothing suspicious. Odd. One culprit is the backups. Every 3 days the forum makes automatic backups now. But the problem is that I told it to keep 3 backups and overwrite them as new backups are made, keeping the number at 3. But the forum isn't doing that, instead it's making more than 3 backups which eventually take up more space than it should. That's just one factor. I'm not sure why. I'll have to contact the developer and find out why the backup tool isn't working as it should.
Check out my FUN video clips in Russia and SE Asia and Female Encounters of the Foreign Kind video series and Full Russia Trip Videos!

Join my Dating Site to meet thousands of legit foreign girls at low cost!

"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
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