Servers down?

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In my own experience, it's usually the employers which notice first. A backup cluster going wild at odd times, weird spikes in the throughput, printers being commanded to spam, usually by recently let-go associates or security teams having a laugh.

Embedded OS security is the worst, damnable printers running unpatched version of XP or ancient linux distros. I've stopped caring though, there only so many times you can push that rock uphill with the CIO.
 
Odd behavior, even in solo. When things go sideways, the SSS appear to spawn navy vessels only from what I've been able to deduce. Maybe it's random, but when you hit 3-4 SSS and all you see are navy vessels, one starts to think somethings up.
 
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Whoaaaa, with a few exceptions, just replace "British" by "Parisian", and you can use the list for French people. Actually, Parisians. Which is fine since most of them believe France frontiers stops right at the peripherique.

French for "that's not bad" is even even more tricky: "that's not uninteresting". Oh and the "I hear you" is exactly the same. I got so fed up with this one that now, when someone tells me that, I commend his/her ears for being functional and proceed to ask them if they actually understood. And I'm being as rude as can be doing so.
 
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Thanks for your patience everyone, we understand that a number of you experienced intermittent service over the weekend. The outages were caused by an automated attack on our game server which affected a small number of our servers, but the online team worked over the weekend to ensure that our servers remained online. We have also managed to track down the source and the player responsible who has now been banned from the game.

Service should now be restored to normal - thanks to everyone who reported problems to us during this period.
Thank you. I'm sure your team worked hard at this, working out what was going on and then stopping it.

However, we spent the weekend suffering from Mushroom Syndrome, which is never nice and could so easily have been avoided had someone spent just one minute posting to the bug forum. "Sorry, we're suffering a DDoS attack on our servers. More later."

Having the Server Status page saying that the servers were "OK" when they patently weren't didn't help (more mushroom feed anyone?). Another minute spent updating the Server Status page "Mostly OK (DDoS attack under way)" wouldn't have hurt either.

Also someone should have told the Mods, but they seemed as much in the dark as the rest of us.
 
Embedded OS security is the worst, damnable printers running unpatched version of XP or ancient linux distros. I've stopped caring though, there only so many times you can push that rock uphill with the CIO.

Oh, if only I could tell you what some peeps have done with network printers. It's both creatively wonderful and utterly appalling.
 
Ah, IT Admins - never let an opportunity slide to dust off the old horror stories do they? It's like a BOFH fan convention in here.
 

Jenner

I wish I was English like my hero Tj.
Mods have one responsibility. To watch over the forums. They are not FD employees not do they get access to any extra information that we plain old forumites get.

^

Mods don't have a 'red phone' with a direct connection to David Braben's desk that we can dial whenever the forum demands answers. :) I think if we did it would never stop ringing, lol.
 
Thank you. I'm sure your team worked hard at this, working out what was going on and then stopping it.

However, we spent the weekend suffering from Mushroom Syndrome, which is never nice and could so easily have been avoided had someone spent just one minute posting to the bug forum. "Sorry, we're suffering a DDoS attack on our servers. More later."

Having the Server Status page saying that the servers were "OK" when they patently weren't didn't help (more mushroom feed anyone?). Another minute spent updating the Server Status page "Mostly OK (DDoS attack under way)" wouldn't have hurt either.

Also someone should have told the Mods, but they seemed as much in the dark as the rest of us.

Hi guys. Server guys are aware of the issues. Working to iron things out now.

Hi everyone, just a quick note to say sorry about the intermittent outages this evening. Thanks for the feedback and your messages, will come back with more information ASAP.

You may have seen my apology yesterday? Still waiting on more information. Sorry there are still issues.

Thanks for your patience everyone, we understand that a number of you experienced intermittent service over the weekend. The outages were caused by an automated attack on our game server which affected a small number of our servers, but the online team worked over the weekend to ensure that our servers remained online. We have also managed to track down the source and the player responsible who has now been banned from the game.

Service should now be restored to normal - thanks to everyone who reported problems to us during this period.

No need to worry, not quite as black and white as that. Nothing to worry about at all.

http://eft.recoil.org
 
I don't mind the server going down so much, as it is inevitable in an online game. What I do mind though is the lack of information. The first thing I did was check the server status on the website and it said everything was fine.... when it clearly wasn't.

I assume there is more than one server running, so how come there is just one status? Shouldn't there be a status per server, so that we can check against the specific game server we are connected to?
 
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just to remind you alll that dos != ddos. the extra d stands for "distributed", meaning there is no single source for the attack, rather zillions of them (most likely a botnet) flooding the target. so i dunno what this kid did, but it definitely wasn't a ddos.

if this kid managed to take the servers down from home that would be evidence of a blatant security hole, either in software or in network setup. let's hope it was fixed.

also, as some pointed out, it is entirely possible that the kid's computer and account were compromised and the attack performed by someone else. but then again it most likely would have been another kid causing trouble, a serious attacker wouldn't expose a compromised machine so openly either.

and, i find the official explanation a bit cheesy, some more detail would be appreciated.
 
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