The Latest Downtime/State of the Sphere
 

Dear Eratosphereans,

It’s been quite a long time since we suffered a server outage, thanks to the security measures I implemented after recovering from past attacks. Your contributions also greatly enhanced our server's resources.

However, these security measures proved insufficient against ongoing denial of service attacks, which filled up the disk storage and caused a crash. This situation persisted for over 24 hours, and many of you who tried to access the site must have noticed the downtime.

I apologize for not informing you sooner. I was fully occupied diagnosing the source of the excess data to combat the attacks and had no time to send updates. At one point, I considered upgrading to a server with much more disk space, which would have been extremely expensive. Fortunately, after extensive debugging and investigation, I identified the issue and where the disk space was being consumed.

It took almost an entire business day to remove the problematic files and restore the server to operational status. After the unclogging—to illustrate how bad things were—we went from 99+% full to only 19% full! To prevent this from happening again, I have implemented an automatic script to clean up those specific areas of the server daily.

The worst is behind us now, and everything is back to normal. I'm glad to report that there was no loss of user data; I managed to recover and restore everything to its pre-failure state.

Thank you all for your support.

Onward with writing, reading, and editing!

Cheers,
…Alex

Thank you, Alex.

Yes. Thanks Alex. It sounds like a bit of a nightmare. But it also sounds like you've got to the bottom of it. :)

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Labor of love. Guardian of the words. Thanks Alex.

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Yeah, withdrawal symptoms were minor. Thanks for the quick fix, Alex!

Thank you, Alex.

Thanks so much, Alex. Such efforts are truly heroic. Many companies are suffering from weird glitches on their systems these days, so I hear from my daughter who’s into this stuff, and so to be able so resolve it single-handedly is quite an accomplishment. :)

Thank you all for the good words, Ann, Joe, Jim, Carl, Michael, Siham ... and everyone else!

Cheers,
...Alex

Also, the server appears to run faster after the unclogging of the hackers’ data dumping! Can you report back here if you've noticed this ... or not?

Cheers,
...Alex

Thanks for all your work, Alex.

Susan