Xtreme Gaming Network

General Category => News => Topic started by: Bird on October 17, 2020, 05:42:48 PM

Title: Forum upgrade
Post by: Bird on October 17, 2020, 05:42:48 PM
Gents I've upgraded the forum to the latest.

However some of the mods were quite out of date so they could not be reinstalled.

One of these things it seems was the youtube tags - so just put your youtube link into the post and it should be replaced.   One thing; the shorthand url (youtu.be) does not work with a start time, so for that you need to use the full url format.

The recent outages it seems were caused by bots/crawlers overloading the server, hopefully the upgrade helps with that.
Title: Re: Forum upgrade
Post by: Wally on October 17, 2020, 05:44:57 PM
Thanks Bird. The bots were out of control. Luckily not many of them managed to actually post anything. I kill bot posts pretty quickly and remove the accounts anyway.
Title: Re: Forum upgrade
Post by: Bird on October 17, 2020, 06:03:20 PM
Thanks Bird. The bots were out of control. Luckily not many of them managed to actually post anything. I kill bot posts pretty quickly and remove the accounts anyway.

Annoying thing is I could geo-block overseas requests, that'd reduce the numbers significantly, but it multiplies the server cost, as it requires a step up in the aws infrastructure. :(
Title: Re: Forum upgrade
Post by: Bacchulum on October 17, 2020, 06:04:52 PM
So they let it happen to screw you out of dollars? >:(
Title: Re: Forum upgrade
Post by: Bird on October 17, 2020, 09:19:24 PM
So they let it happen to screw you out of dollars? >:(

Huh?  No.

This is running on a normal instance - a t2.micro one.  However, a normal server does not have the infrastructure to apply geoblocking.  For that you need a VPN, a load balancer, and an AWS firewall with geoblocking rules set up.   All this is ok for commercial applications, however it's a massive extra cost on a little community server like this.   

For now all I could think of is to bump up the server to a t2.small, which does double the cost, but still nowhere near as bad as all the extra infrastructure would be.  (the monthly cost goes from $10US to $20US)

TBH it maybe an idea to tune Apache & mysql a bit, so instead of flopping it'd just reject requests, but it's all time, time, time to play around with these.   Anyway, I'll try and do it at some point.


For now, blame the friggen script kiddies who run their botnets looking for easy hacks.
Title: Re: Forum upgrade
Post by: Bacchulum on October 17, 2020, 09:28:47 PM
My bad. :-[
I thought it was just a software feature they were withholding.
Didn't realize the infrastructure implications.
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