Network Problems

There is a difference between the two - DoS is an attack from a specific user, DDos is a Distributed attack, usually from a botnet, so you get larger volumes but more importantly the attacks can come in from thousands of different and unpredictable IPs which can't easily be blocked.That's why I said your hosting company could simply block the single IP at their firewall. They can. Whether they will depends on the T&Cs and your relationship with them.

I experienced the problem myself this morning and have rebooted the server.

EVC was totally unavailable for several hours this morning.

More 503s yesterday and today - don't think I'll be using the site to post anymore until the DoS is stopped - I'm losing 1 out of 5 attempts and as I type this I have no clue whether it'll get lost or not.

It took me a few years of losing posts (accidental 'Back' button pushes or page refreshes or whatever), before I started typing up every single reply into Notepad and then pasting them into the text box for submission.I recommend everyone do this, regardless. Its nice to have another copy of your proposal laying around that you can't easily lose.And with the 'Peek Mode' button, you can easily paste formatted text into the Notepad right from the message you are replying to.

I just copy every post to the Clipboard before clicking Submit.

If I can't see it with my eyes, then I'm not comfortable just assuming that it is there somewhere.

More DOS?

I think now that it was only a coincidence that when I investigated a while back that someone was banging hard on the server at the same time. I don't think it was a DOS attack. The outages that have occurred since then have not been accompanied by any intensive accesses as recorded in the access log file. I am actively investigating.--Percy

I was using the Notepad technique for a while. I found that some browsers retain your messages when you hit back and others do not. I am currently using Chrome exclusively and I don't lose messages anymore. Even if I close a tab in the middle of typing a message, if I reopen the tab, the text is there.Perhaps there is some setting that turns this behavior on and off, but I've quit using Notepad for now.

My webhosting company suspects the problem is insufficient RAM. I just posted this announcement:The server will undergo a hardware update at 3 PM Eastern Time US to increase the amount of RAM. This should fix the problem with intermittent slowness and outages.I'm not sure how long the site will be down, but installing more RAM is usually a very simple operation, so I would estimate no more than half an hour.

Thank you. Vastly improved loading since.

Thank you sir.

Snipped..Just thinking out loud. I snipped the ramblings.Seems okay so far.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

No 503s so far.....