E-M server problems?

fonik · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 12:01 am Post subject: E-M server problems?

i experienced some problems yesterday. i was not able to contact the e-m site from my PC at home. got the following error message:

elektro80 · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 12:02 am Post subject:

I don´t even know if this is a valid error message from the board software.
Howard?
Paul?

EdisonRex · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 1:35 am Post subject:

phpBB definitely doesn't have a message like that. Nor does Apache.
I'm going to do some research to see where that message came from. Very odd.

fonik · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 1:40 am Post subject:

found that code (don't have clue of these things, though):

http://www.fravia.com/bot-block.php.txt

it contains this error message...

fonik · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 1:45 am Post subject:

so someone is using my IP-Address for a webcrawler??? i thought my broadband provider determines the IP...

blue hell · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 6:33 am Post subject:

Matthias,

the message you get is a message generated by the forum. It may not be a standard message, and indeed I think Howard made it. It's something that I have seen in the past as well and it's meant to stop bots and crawlers from going too active (and I actually had a bot running at the forum at that time to grab G2 patches which caused this message to appear).

When the detection code is correct it can only mean that the same computer that you used to log in was used to access the forum. However when Scott posted your message here yesterday you had not been logged in for just over 24 hours (had it been a shorter period I would not have been able to see it). So whatever it was it was not using your user name and password.

It can also be that the detection code was in error of course, but this is something for Howard to speak about. I think that I've also seen the message at other times, but I can't remember the details. Or maybe the IP address was spoofed, that's another possibility.

blue hell · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 6:36 am Post subject:

fonik · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 6:47 am Post subject:

thank you jan,

to be honest i don't understand everyhting you said, esepcially:

blue hell · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 6:57 am Post subject:

Yes that's a contradiction.

The script detects the IP used, but it is possible to fake IP addresses and I don't know if the script is able to detect that - it doesn't look too smart though.

Most of your posts seem to come from the same IP address (about 740 I think when I looked at it yesterday), so that's probably a fixed home IP address and you are not able to change that.

So either the IP has to time out (which seems to happen after a day) or Howard will have to remove it from the block list manually.

Is it possible that your computer runs software you are not aware of?

blue hell · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 7:04 am Post subject:

I PMed Howard to draw his attention to this.

fonik · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 7:11 am Post subject:

fonik · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 9:48 am Post subject:

thank you again for all your efforts, jan.

my provider obviously assigned me a new IP today and everything is working fine now.

mosc · Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 11:28 am Post subject:

Thanks for the heads up about this.

I've been running this script for well over a year and never had any problem with it. Don't really know why all of a sudden it would attack Fonik. I've cleaned up its database which includes all of the ips. It will start over keeping track. Maybe that's all that is needed.