server not available message

[harborbill]

Just wondering if anyone else could not get to the site yesterday the 11th ?.
I got a server error, site not found type message all day. I know that Ron said that the liscense was due to end on the 11th. I got scared that the site was caput. Glad to see it is back today.
Bill

[ABD]

Yeah same here Bill....figured Ron was doin some tinkerin or something..lol

[Meanmachine]

same here Bill .

[harborbill]

Thanks, at least now I know it wasn't just me.
Bill

[bigwater]

One of the other domains on the server got hacked, and its domain space replaced by a mass email worm. I noticed this last Thursday when the server loads started creeping up. As the word spread about the email worm amongst the Nigerian spammers, more and more of them started using it until we were sending out 6000 email messages/hr, the ceiling I have set on the number of emails that could be sent. Due to this ceiling, most of the messages were piling up in the email send queue, to the point of having over 200,000 in it at one time. I spent all night Friday, all day and night both Saturday and Sunday, and most all day and part of the night on both Monday and Tuesday straightening the mess out. Part of what has to be done was reinstalling/upgrading both MySQL and PHP. The server was out of commission during the four to five hours I was performing those upgrades yesterday afternoon/evening. It wasn't just Abtech that was down, it was all sites on the server. The entire server was effectively offline during the upgrades.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but small inconveniences here and there will hopefully prevent disasterous inconveniences at some point in the future. I would normally send out a mass email to notify members of a specific date and time that the server would be unavailable if I was going to have to bring it down for this sort of extreme maintenance, but in this case I had no choice but to do it NOW, not three days from now.

It is kind of ironic that all this happened right at the license due date. I can imagine everybody's fears and the angst of "why didn't I donate when I had the chance?" So donate regularly to avoid that angst ;)

[Jeroen - CDM]

Damn Nigerians, getting really sick of those 'cyber criminals':breakcomp: On the other hand.....I have to admit...they're pretty friggin clever LOL

[sharonsstudio]

If only the Hackers would put their brains to good use.. imagine what they would get accomplished...