Trac and forum up again

You probably noticed earlier today that the trac and forum were working again. They finally fixed the issue (which was according to them probably a bad RAM module or the CPU fan) by replacing completely the server (but keeping the hard drive).

I think that it's the CPU fan that failed, not the RAM module. But whatever, it works again and that was what we all wanted.

Trac and forum down

All started Sunday, around 6AM GMT, our 4-year old dedicated server wasn't responding anymore and even a hardware reboot didn't bring it up. So, I opened a ticket and the technicians noticed the power supply died and quickly replaced it.

Everything worked fine until Monday morning, 9AM GMT, the server started to be unstable. I first thought it was Apache because during my tests, the process used several times 100% CPU when it crashed.
Then I tried stopping Apache and MySQL, the 2 most consuming processes (the CPU usage was on average at 6% without these 2 processes) and even with that, it was crashing after 15 minutes.

I thought that our kernel might be corrupted due to the crash of the server, so I tried using one of their netboot kernel (as well as the hardware testing mode) and it kept crashing.

So, I just opened another ticket for this issue. I really wonder what's going on.

Also, the migration of the forum and trac to the new server was planned at the end of this month but it might happen sooner than expected (I'll try to do it this week-end).

I'll keep you updated.

Finding the author of the DoS

As I said, I know the IP address of the author of the DoS on our website and since he's located in Europe (Spain), it shouldn't be really hard to solve the case with the Computer Crime Unit.

However, I would like to try to solve it with him first. I just want him to contact me (tdotreppe@aircrack-ng.org) within 2 weeks to reimburse the bandwidth he generated and explain why he did it and I promise there will be no consequence, no complaint registered.

Paying the bill

I finally found who is the responsible or at least the IP address of the author of this DoS (if generating 1.5Tb of traffic in 2 days and making the monthly traffic exceed thus making the website down is not a DoS, then what is it?) and you can be sure that this guy will have to pay the traffic, sooner or later.

Administrative stuff is taking too long so I think it will be easier to pay the bill now to have the website back up.

Aircrack-ng cost me around 60 euro per month (+ domain names that have to be renewed each year, wireless cards, traffic, ...) and although we have around 30K unique visitors each day, unfortunatly donations are quite low (the total for last year was around 80 euro). The reason why I'm writing this post is to ask for donations to pay that bill (around 130 euro).

So, any donation to tdotreppe@aircrack-ng.org (paypal) is really welcome.

Website down

Unfortunatly, the website is down due to an error in traffic calculation.

We usually use 30-40Gbytes per day and we have 1200Gbytes of traffic per month, so enough for each month.
But the 14 and 15 April, their system say we use 688 and 884Gb (= more than 10Mbytes/sec for 24 hours) of traffic (so 20-30 times what we usually use) thus exceeding the allowed traffic per month.

I'm contacting them to try to fix it as soon as possible.

Edit:
Here is an update: http://aircrack-ng.blogspot.com/2009/04/paying-bill.html

Forum down

As you saw, the forum has been down since a few hours, around 6pm GMT+1.

The reason is that the database size is really close to the allowed disk space and the hoster stopped it automatically. I moved it to another place (where we have much more space) and there are just a few things to do before it's back up:
- DNS needs to be updated
- a few glitches on the server have to be fixed
- A script has to be written to redirect all requests from forum.tinyshell.be to the new URL (so that any link to it will still work).

The good news is that nothing was lost and it should be faster than before.

Ah yeah, ... It should be back up tomorrow evening and the release of 1.0rc3 will be done the next day :).