A brief history of the past Forum Outages

[Lisias]

The original thread was locked before I could save the post, so I'm reposting that material here!

Quote

i heard it was a global DoS attack that caused the forums to be restored from an old backup, but the first few were corrupted or smh, so they wound it back to the last october, deleting everything that came after that

Oh, that one.... I had forgot that "Derp" was related to the 2013 one, sorry...

I was talking about the vBulletin to IPS change that happened in 2015:

and also

Spoiler

and

Some data were missed/scrambled on the migration, and since there were way more people around here in 2015 than in 2013, this one got way more attention and fuzz.

What you were talking about, now I know better, is this one:

and since the migration I mentioned above screwed the links on this thread, follows the correct link to the Notice mentioned on some posts (as it were scrambled by the migration):

 

And since are here, I just found this one too :

Apparently, Forum borkages are kinda of a tradition around here...

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Now, trying to answer your original question (properly this time):

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is that what caused the Great April Derp of 2013?

What happened last month is more related to this one than anything else: both are related to exhausting quotas (besides with slightly different outcomes).

This recent one happened because Forum, after building the response for the requested Resource Name (see this post), received a "nope, you can't" from the network while trying to send it back. There was no overloading on the processing, only the aswering being sent to the Krakens because the outbound quota was exhausted.

In 2013, Forum was being effectively attacked, probably trying to exploit some of the many, many vulnerabilities that were common on Web Applications on that time (boy, I really don't have good memories from PHP-Nuke). Since the database got screwed, I'm betting that some SQL Injection was exploited, allowing the attacker to destroy the data on the MySQL Database, and probably this was the reason they had to rollback to the last backup. The DoS attack was probably issued in parallel, to make very difficult for the admins to reach the Forum and detect and block the attack.

But Software on that era was, really, way more brittle than nowadays so it's also possible that the DoS attack was simply a massive adding of new trash posts until the database outgrew the filesystem size and by them the database itself would start to ruin its own data itself. This also was a pretty common problem on MySQL databases (mostly because it was more used, and usually by less seasoned professionals - almost every database will be in deep trouble if it exhaust its filesystem, but the really good ones will just halt processing and start to cry for help).

In a way or another, Forum did not got in danger this time. Not only Software nowadays is more resilient, as the most common attacks are already known and mitigated before reaching the vulnerable lower layers, but in essence what exhausted wasn't the server itself, it was the bandwidth (more or less like 2011).

Edited 1 hour ago by Lisias
Oh, yeah... Tyops...

[Eclipse 32]

ok!

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

So I'm happy to see the forums are back.  On my end, the system kept asking if I had misspelled the search term 'ksp forums'. 

 

That got me a little concerned. 

 

But Reddit told me to be patient - the forums were just being ported to new servers under the new ownership. 

Was that what happened? 

 

(also - to the extent that it is under new owners...  THANK YOU!  (love this place!)) 

[Vanamonde]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

But Reddit told me to be patient - the forums were just being ported to new servers under the new ownership. 

Maybe? We have no details other than something to do with the change of ownership. 

[Jacke]

@Lisias, @Vanamonde, there was a major forum issue, i think in either late 2015 or in 2016 or 2017.  Where very active topics were just lost.  I think the top 10 actively discussed mods in KSP Mod Releases all lost their topics.  Those that were still under support had to create new topics.

I believe why this couldn't be fixed was because of the nature of the lose of topics and the way backups were made, there was no way to selective restore topics.  And as the forums had moved on, none of the lost topics were fixed.

I remember this because I used to play with Better Than Starting Manned.  The author got burned out trying to follow the changes from v1.0 to 1.0.4 and gave up.  But there was still sort of a community playing it.  But its topic got blown away in that event.  And that was that.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, Jacke said:

I believe why this couldn't be fixed was because of the nature of the lose of topics and the way backups were made, there was no way to selective restore topics.  And as the forums had moved on, none of the lost topics were fixed.

Perhaps is was the 2015 vBulleting to IPC migration? It happened in November 26th, 2015.

I found some people complaining about passwords being reset, and this one lost theirl contact list:

 

Edited 18 minutes ago by Lisias
Entertaining grammars made slightly less entertaining.

[Jacke]

52 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Perhaps is was the 2015 vBulleting to IPC migration? It happened in November 26th, 2015.

I don't think so, Lisias.  I remember the forum changeover due to the links all changing.

I have quite a few old BTSM links and the mains ones are all after the 2015 change.

Here's a Wayback Machine link from its snapshot (only of the first few pages) from 2016 Nov 21.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161121234048/http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com:80/index.php?/topic/56101-104better-than-starting-manned-career-mode-redefined-v1002-sep-21st/

It's an IPC link.  Some time after that (January?) was when all those topics were just lost.

Edited 21 minutes ago by Jacke