Web site availability today (04/20/2008)

In my area, it was way too nice out today to be surfing the web but, while I was having lunch, I was trying to catch up on things related to this site. I am readying a second email on the plans for the 2008 Carlisle All-Ford Nationals, I had a bunch of new registrations to process and general email to reply to. The forums have also been very active. I have hesitated to mention my pleasure in seeing that recently as it will probably doom their popularity. I’m superstitious like that.

While I was online I noticed that a large portion of the site went offline as I was using it. That part was the piece written in Java: the forums and the ebay auction listings. I restarted it and then went back to the forums. I went to see who might also be online and saw that the number of users kept growing; 10 then 20 then 30. All of the usage was from the same IP address: 213.231.68.242. Something using this address was establishing an ever increasing number of sessions with the forums until the Java server engine crashed. This happened a couple of times with me restarting it in between each. I don’t know how many sessions it ultimately grew to before each crash but at one point I saw well over 500.

I decided I needed to take some action and ended up blocking the address. That seemed to quiet things down.

Trying to track who owns that address has proved less than useful. I have seen dozens of concurrent sessions established before by the various web search robots crawling the forums and indexing it. For those robots, they nicely reported their origins and obeyed my directive in robots.txt to skip my site in the few rare cases where there scanning seemed excessive and I “opted out”. What the purpose of this traffic was remains a mystery.

So, my purpose for writing this post is two fold. One is to let you know that I apologize for today’s outage. It may happen again so hang in there if you find the site down. The second is to get this IP address documented. Search engines will pick up this post and hopefully when the next person goes to search for it they will find they are not alone. In the mean time I will be checking the logs tomorrow and will include any updates on what I find along with this post.