forums.jaspp.org.uk

This site requires urgent maintenance and is very likely to go down on its own. I'm manually bringing it back up when I notice for the time being, but it may go down for good any day.

At some point I'll rebuild the server from scratch to resolve the issues, just not sure when that will be. I'll post an update once the work is complete.

The package distribution point will also go down when the server is rebuilt, so apologies for any inconvenience that may cause.

I've finally got around to upgrading the hardware and reinstalling the OS / PHPBB to the latest versions.

Please be aware that this site and the PackMan distribution points will go offline on 5th Oct 2021 for maintenance. It should be back online later the same day or the next.

Maintenance completed, the site should now be back to normal.

It's that time of the year where urgent maintenance is required. The server will be going up and down whilst I sort the underlying issue out.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused. I'll post an update once the issue is resolved.

I've fixed the initial issue so the site should now be stable.

The server will go down for a few minutes at some point, whilst its moved back to the UPS power feed.

This site along with the PackMan distribution site will be unavailable for short periods of time up to the end of 2022, as server maintenance is performed.

EDIT: The server maintenance tasks have been completed

This site along with the PackMan distribution site will be unavailable on 27th Jan 2024, as server maintenance is performed.

EDIT: The server maintenance tasks have been completed

This site, along with the software distribution points have been down over the past two weeks due to AI bot scraping causing extreme server load. Even with filters and firewalling, it’s seeing over 250K connections per hour. The situation got worse recently because the bots have moved from data centres and static IP ranges, into dynamic consumer IP ranges. They’ve also switched from identifiable client ID’s, to ID’s that look like regular browsers.

Over the weekend I fronted the site with Cloudflare, which hasn’t affected the number of hits, but has offloaded a lot of the traffic to their infrastructure. This has got the site back, with some issues. I’ve also restricted the number of connections, so the site will intermittently appear to be down.

I’ve got further changes to make to restore full site functionality, you might notice login attempts fail or get randomly logged out.

At some point this week, I’ll be migrating the site to a new host that can handle more load so expect the site to go down at some point. I’ll post an update once the migration is complete.

The site migration is mostly complete.

There’s some caching/session issues to resolve, for example sessions might appear to log out when going to pages the local browser has already seen prior to log-in.

The SSL certificate is also questionable as the hierarchy is showing LetsEncrypt despite being a new Cloudflare issued cert. I’ll find out once the current cert expires on June 6th.

As Cloudflare isn’t picking up on most of the AI trawlers, rate limiting is in force - I have this under review as I suspect the way the bot nets are working will bypass it.

There’s currently no Cloudflare challenges when first opening the site. This is under review, I’ll make a call on enforcing them once I’ve seen the traffic stats for a few weeks.