That could be a big part of it. DOS kiddies like to screw with us.
By the way, for those who are wondering about FR's hardware, my understanding is that we have about a dozen servers at the data center. About half of them are dedicated to handling Free Republic back-end processing. We also have a couple front-end servers directing the traffic and balancing the load, a couple database servers, an administrative server, a secure server, and a real-time database backup server. We have two main IP's, one as a standby if the first goes down. We also have some older servers that John uses for backup and development.
Theoretically, we have a fail-safe system. The "fail" seems to be working great, now we're working on perfecting the "safe" part.
It appears that our current series of crashes have to do with our traffic load. It appears that our servers begin overloading and first one crashes (by becoming completely jammed and failing to respond) then the next, and the next, etc, until the entire system and all backups fail to respond. That's when we have to start rebooting. And we've had some problems recently with our rebooting process.
We do not know yet why we are overloading. We have been able to handle several times our normal load with no problem. We do not rule out DOS attack, but cannot find anything in the logs to identify it. John will continue trying to isolate the problem, but we do not feel at this time that it is for a lack of server power.
All I can say is, please bear with us. We've experienced these kinds of systems problems before whether hardware, software, balancing or Bolshevik, and have always been able to work through or around them eventually.
God willing, we will persevere!
Thanks for the info.
If source of interference not identified quickly, then there probably needs to be raw packet inspection at the router/switch level. Cisco or other network engineers could make short work of that.
Thank you, Jim.
Anyone posting here under a screen name has to know that every post is read into a database for the 0bots to search and scan for any opportunity to attack and attack again.
You can just picture these people, who are probably stuck in some adolescent anti-parent mode, peculiarly slavish to the freedom-quashing efforts and dissent-smashing tripe that attaches itself to all who work under the terms of the present administration.
After all, Nazi was ‘merely’ a political party at first.
Besides, we don’t get the face-to-face smackdown opportunities with nose-in-the-air types like Huffington and Krugman, who no doubt simply have their security goons pick off their opposition.
Anyone reading this who does not understand that we’ll all be called to stand for freedom now or get on our knees for crumbs has no clue about the fight.
I’m rather fond of the perverted screen name profiles on other sites that have this moniker. Someone out there gets a hard on for me every once in awhile.
Me, I just wish FR could be paid for the pearls that pop up on here, since I know for a fact they’re used.
I am Joe Wilson, plumber at large.
Jim,
I had no idea how hard John has to work to keep FR up and running!
Maybe we should all chip in and buy him a Superman cape!
Thank You for FR!
Randy