ASL Scenario Archive is down

Honza

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"database not found" was the latest report.
 

Blofeld

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Or perhaps von Marwitz overloaded the system by feeding the the Scenario Archive with the map Esebeck's Pursuit.... ?:D
 

Michael Dorosh

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I get this:

Code:
Warning:  mysqli_connect(): (08004/1040): Too many connections in /var/www/asl/top.php on line 57

Notice:  Trying to get property 'connect_errno' of non-object in /var/www/asl/top.php on line 58

Warning:  mysqli_query() expects parameter 1 to be mysqli, boolean given in /var/www/asl/top.php on line 72

Notice:  Trying to get property 'error' of non-object in /var/www/asl/top.php on line 72
Failed Query 123: Select * from users where is_bot=0 and (lower(login)='michael dorosh' or lower(email)='michael dorosh') and (enc_password='c3f2a47cd6bc5a64393f72ee770741bf766' or enc_password=sha1('c3f2a47cd6bc5a64393f72ee770741bf766'))

Ended
 

JRKrejsa

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I get this:

Code:
Warning:  mysqli_connect(): (08004/1040): Too many connections in /var/www/asl/top.php on line 57

Notice:  Trying to get property 'connect_errno' of non-object in /var/www/asl/top.php on line 58

Warning:  mysqli_query() expects parameter 1 to be mysqli, boolean given in /var/www/asl/top.php on line 72

Notice:  Trying to get property 'error' of non-object in /var/www/asl/top.php on line 72
Failed Query 123: Select * from users where is_bot=0 and (lower(login)='michael dorosh' or lower(email)='michael dorosh') and (enc_password='c3f2a47cd6bc5a64393f72ee770741bf766' or enc_password=sha1('c3f2a47cd6bc5a64393f72ee770741bf766'))

Ended
Same here. But it is up now.
 

Michael Dorosh

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Seems like this website is up and down a lot. Is it still being maintained as of July 2020?
I used it last week with no problems. They just underwent a site redesign so it seems unlikely it would be abandoned. The feller who does the Illuminating Round youtube channel maintains it.

Actually, looks like he named his channel after the archive:

 

daveramsey

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Hey guys,

Just to explain.. Every now and again (usually every couple of days) a bot hits the site and requests thousands of advanced searches. The database connections are recycled and are closed correctly, but there are a finite number of connections, and if you open a request faster than a slow(ish) advanced (25-200ms) search runs you eat into the connections available. At a certain point the database just gives up and seems to die. Now - that shouldn't happen - but I think what goes on is that if a connection is recycled every few minutes, and at that point the bot has queued up a few thousand more requests, no matter how many connections are recycled, the site can't recover because each time a new connection is available the request has been lined up ready to request another search.

My latest change has been to automate a reboot every 3 days (I may make this every night) just to mean that - worst case - the site will automatically come back the next time 4am uk time rolls around (if I haven't caught it before then) and to add a "no robots" meta tag to the advanced search page. I'm not particularly hopeful that this will resolve it, but rest assured I am maintaining the site and generally someone tags me, either on facebook, email or here when the site goes down. The problem is sometimes I'm sleeping, or travelling/away from a keyboard and I don't see the alert for a few hours.

If anyone wants to investigate log files, etc - I can provide stuff. Mysql, Apache, php and Ubuntu 20.something is the platform.

Cheers,

Dave
 

Pacman Ghost

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Every now and again (usually every couple of days) a bot hits the site and requests thousands of advanced searches.
You have to rate-limit requests. I've dealt with these assholes before, and they can be tenacious :-/ But as a quick fix, banning IP's and/or user agents might be enough. If you send me the logs, I can write you a quick script to extract that information.

I use the Uptime Robot to monitor my sites. They have a free tier, and it seems to work ? You could maybe automate a reboot based on what it's telling you, but it'd be better to fix the underlying problem :)
 

holdit

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Hey guys,

Just to explain.. Every now and again (usually every couple of days) a bot hits the site and requests thousands of advanced searches. The database connections are recycled and are closed correctly, but there are a finite number of connections, and if you open a request faster than a slow(ish) advanced (25-200ms) search runs you eat into the connections available. At a certain point the database just gives up and seems to die. Now - that shouldn't happen - but I think what goes on is that if a connection is recycled every few minutes, and at that point the bot has queued up a few thousand more requests, no matter how many connections are recycled, the site can't recover because each time a new connection is available the request has been lined up ready to request another search.
Your site is fantastic, by the way. Big massive, gi-normous thumbs up. ???
 

pixelgeek

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Hey guys,

Just to explain.. Every now and again (usually every couple of days) a bot hits the site and requests thousands of advanced searches.
Have you tried to restrict its access via a robots.txt file?
 

daveramsey

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Have you tried to restrict its access via a robots.txt file?
Yep - see my post above.

You have to rate-limit requests.
Rate-limiting from my initial investigation wasn't quite right as that seemed to do things on a bandwidth level, the search results page isn't very resource intensive from a bandwidth perspective, I need limit the actual number of requests per minute from any given source (to somewhere around 30-60 I'd think). I think mod_evasive does this, and that's the next step, if it continues.

Cheers all!
 
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