Open Thread - 09-05-25 - Loose Ends
Things are happening quickly in my life as I struggle to tie up many loose ends. There are so many things I need to get in order around the house and yard, among a myriad of other things. Hopefully I tied up a big one yesterday, c99. Fingers and toes crossed.
In my many efforts to troubleshoot the site's problems I had shut off the database logging because it can be a resource hog. When I turned it back on, some days later, I saw that c99 was being hammered with database requests by, let's just say, unwanted actors, be they spammers or even more nefarious denizens from the dark side of the net. One particular country was the origin of most of the database requests. Can you guess which country that was? There's a prize waiting for the first person that guesses correctly in the comments below.
I'll stop short of calling it a full blown DDOS attack, but it was enough to bring the server to its knees.
After much deliberation and as a last ditch effort I implemented a CDN. It greatly helped to decease load times and to block unwanted database requests. Cloudflare is used by millions of sites around the world, it's the largest and best known that's available. It's had its problems in the past but that's supposedly been corrected.
It can take up to 72 hours for the CDN to work fully as it needs to propagate the www's DNS. That's why you were seeing the error pages with all the strange hops that it was taking around the globe. That's how a CDN works.
Things were still a bit dodgy for a couple of days after it was implemented. The loading times got a little bit better but still wasn't optimal. I was about to give up after day two. That night, right before I went to bed, I paused the CDN, essentially shutting it off, to see what would happen. I woke up the next morning and the site was down, I couldn't even access it. I reactivated the CDN and voila, it was loading like it should. It took three days to fully propagate the DNS, as was predicted.
Like it or not, it brought the site back from the dead. You can see the results for yourself. There are certainly other issues afoot as well, but that seems to be the big one.
The next phase of my unexpected journey starts tomorrow, chemo therapy. I don't know what to expect with so many potential side effects, physical and mental exhaustion are two of the most prevalent. I haven't given much thought to writing about politics with so much on my plate, but hopefully I can get back in the swing of things in the near future.
I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Peace out folks.
Comments
Good morning Free Rangers...
the jury is still out on the site performance, we may still see some glitches but I'll try to work through them if and when they arise. As I've said before, I hesitate to even mention it because every time I do it jinxes me.
I have a prize waiting, sitting right next to me, to be mailed out to the first person who guesses the country of origin of the database requests that were part and parcel to the site's slow to non existent loading time.
My money's
on China. When I ran my own mailserver, most of my problems came from there... Continuous port scans, timeout connections to the server, and all manner of dreck. I gave that up 5 years ago.
You are doing great work in keeping the site going at all. All praise from this quarter! Mostly, take care of yourself- that is the most important thing of all, by far.
Woke this morning to the sounds of many sirens, as the local fire departments responded to a plane crash about a mile from here. Too early to tell, but it was probably one of the many flight school Cessna 172s- it went down into the backup generator banks just outside the big data center just up Peoria, over by Centennial Airport. That's the 5th or 6th in the general neighborhood in the last few years- we seem to have roughly 2 a year. Sometimes, it feels like we live on a dartboard. But it keeps the rent cheap-ish. At least one fatality, but there were probably two on board- instructor/student. I know a lot of the instructors, so now we wait.
On edit- nope, it was a Beechcraft BE35 Bonanza- the fork-tailed doctor killer. Which is even more worrying, as I know two folks who own them at that airport. Two on board, both fatalitites. Now I'm even more concerned.
https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/centennial-small-plane-crash/73...
On edit-edit: it should also be noted that The Day The Music Died was as a result of an inexperienced pilot flying a Bonanza into bad weather conditions...
https://planeandpilotmag.com/the-day-the-music-died/
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Good guess...
China is always one of the big ones, but no cigar in this case. There's always database requests from many countries, but there's one that stands out in the recent c99 log files.
Everybody, every computer on the net is constantly be probed and port scanned for vulnerabilities. Turn on logging on your firewall and you'll see what I mean. But these requests that I speak of are specifically asking for pages with political context which leads to the assumption that they are probing for vulnerabilities in blog sites, and with a large enough amount of requests it's safe to say they are meant to overwhelm a server. A DDOS attack if you will.
Which brings up a point. It tickles me when a government official states that their computers are under attack by bad actors. All nodes (computers) are constantly under attack on the internet, that's the nature of the beast. Be it spammers or hackers or whatever there's always probing going on behind the scenes. So they're being truthful when they say their computers are under attack but they fail to mention that that's par for the course.
Man, that plane crash was too close for comfort. Stay safe, my friend.
My guess
...is London. I don't know anything about IT but I when I read Bamford's book on No Such Agency he said the Brits typically did this work for the US and then passed it on. This however was years ago.
語必忠信 行必正直
No...
not London.
I'll have to look into No Such Agency, it sounds interesting. It's been known for a long time how the Five Eyes countries work together to spy on one another. London was a good guess.
Yup.
I learned that once it becomes clear that you run an exposed mail server (by publishing an MX record in DNS), you tell the world "If this poor schmuck didn't configure his server right, you can hijack it to send out gigabytes of spam emails!". And so every bad actor on the planet beats up all the mail server ports continuously, shipping in malformed packets in an effort to create buffer overruns, and generally attempting to wreak all the havoc they can. My server was always on its knees, with some bursts of 10k hits in a single second (on the end of a garden-variety ADSL line!) - so I gave up and moved my business email server to a hosted site, so that *they* could have the headaches.
I came to feel that the bad guys outnumber the rational, reasonable users of the Net by a couple of orders of magnitude. I don't envy you trying to manage that yourself- I never tried to run a Web server, for exactly that reason.
I still log everything, and have my hardware firewall appliance screwed down as tightly as is humanly possible. To call it a jungle out there does a disservice to jungles everywhere: it is a freakin' colony of perpetually-warring coked-up meth-head tweaker fire ants...
https://cybersecuritynews.com/20-5-million-ddos-attacks/
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
I'll cut the suspense short...
Was it Russia? Nope.
Was it Israel? Nope.
Was it Outer Mongolia? Nope.
It was Ukraine.
Here's what you missed out on:
Winner, winner, chicken dinner!
This delicious frozen chicken dinner would have been shipped to you via USPS if only you had guess the country of origin correctly.
Disclaimer: The dinner may not have reached you in its original frozen condition, dependent upon delivery.
Since no one won this prize, I'll leave it out for the raccoons.
There are two countries
currently waging propaganda wars in addition to physical conflicts. I___ could probably prompt U_S_ to stop the information flow due to high influence in official agencies and NGOs. While yoU_ would probably need to initiate their own actions. There has a formal program for hacking reported in the past.
Cisco monitors top senders of span and malware and U_S_ is still a top player.
My vote is for yoU_.
Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.
Oops just missed the prize
I will have to cook my own dinner from scratch. Would have been spoiled by the time it was delivered anyway.
PS none of my chickens will participate in preparation of this meal.
Still yourself, deep water can absorb many disturbances with minimal reaction.
--When the opening appears release yourself.
Great guess...
unfortunately, you missed the cutoff time by one minute. I can only imagine how disappointed you must be.
Late to the party
.
was going to guess it was the Ukies but ..
busy rehabbing an old landscape trailer
got on the cheap a couple days ago.
The frame is good, needs rewiring & etc.
Otherwise, salvaged a license plate from a
trailer I sold last year. Almost road ready.
Thanks for your efforts to keep this life boat
afloat. Good luck with the chemo. Hope it works.
Zionism is a social disease
Yep...
Ukraine was a likely answer.
Good luck with the trailer and thanks for the well wishes.
My guess was Ukraine...
(Yeah, sure) But I prefer to cook my own chicken dinner.
All joking aside, I want to say thank you for all your work on the site over the years! I also want to wish you all the best with the chemo treatments
Some people have had success fasting while taking chemo.
Taking anti-oxidants has also helped some people.
Be well my friend. Thanks for the OT!
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
You're welcome...
and thanks for the well wishes.
The fasting looks interesting but I'm taking chemo, (Capecitabine) in the oral pill form in the morning and the evening and is recommended to take after a meal.
Tomorrow will be my first experience with it, whatever it brings I must endure.
You be well as well, my friend.
Good morning Johnny, thanks for all you do and did.
I have no advice for dealing with the effects of chemo, based on those I've known who've had it, the effects are all over the map wrt to diets and stuff like that. I was thinking Belgium, btw, as in Brussels.
Mostly, focus on you, your life and your wellness and hang in there.
be well and have a good one, all things considered.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
You're welcome...
as far as the chemo goes, it is what it is. I wont know the effects until I start it and from what I've researched it is milder than other forms of chemo. The effects can be more pronounced the further one gets into the regimen. Chemo affects people differently so hopefully I'm one of the lucky ones that can tolerate it well. I'm in good shape physically so hopefully that will help negate some of the possible side effects. I've been healthy as a horse my whole life so this illness thing is something new to me, for the most part.
I'll hang in there to the best of my ability. Thanks, old friend.
Sending prayers
your way. And thanks for all your work on this site.
Thank you...
cm, I need all that I can get.
Resistance is futile! Zionists and their Zionist-Christian
cohorts are embedded everywhere.
The rest of the tweet:
Somewhat related:
The rest of the tweet:
Good afternoon humphrey...
the subject of both of those tweets are disgusting.
Why not a substack?
Some lady who was getting hounded by the other women where she worked after posting an editorial by a sitting senator saying it's bad to riot and we ought to do something to stop it.
Women can be catty and she worked for a big org, so she quit and started a substack. Invited some friends to write. Much of the web site was centrist, the writing was pretty good.
We know since this week she is selling for over 100 million dollars but less than 200 million. For a bonus she's being given some position at CBS, maybe in charge of the editorial department, or just the news, who knows, I'm sure we all will in good time.
So um, why not substack? You might even be happy to sell out for a measly few tens of millions.
As far as I know...
substack only supports one author, we have multiple authors here.
That is, considering you're not being facetious.
@JtC Why suspect ulterior
Why suspect ulterior motives, about anything? Both substacks I subscribe to have multiple contributors, only way to keep up interest day to day. The Free Press and the Liberal Patriot.
I noticed some less than supportive comments below yours. Weird.
It's because...
of your past history here at c99. When someone tells me who they are, I listen.
would suggest
facetious is more the way to go
considering the author
does he just hang out here to
unbridlel reality? If so, it is a a
no gainer.
Zionism is a social disease
I think that he is being intentionally vague.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/bari-weiss-free-press-cbs/#:~:text=Wei....
Hola, JtC. Good, good luck on
your start with chemo.
The fact that you've been healthy as a horse is a YUGE one in your favor. About that tech question, I would have guessed either Nigeria or one of the corrupt, central European countries. So, I guess Ukraine is in that latter group. LOL. I keep my social media very limited and on a tight leash. I have several degrees in English, including grammar-linguistics. So, I proof via linguistics. Advertising and propaganda are two negative applications of psycholinguistics, so not much if anything gets by me. Good thing cos I am not even close to your level regarding high tech. Anywho, it's my weekend visit to check out the Photo Diary, and joe's music picks for the week. You stay strong, rest, and stay positive. Hope you're getting decent TX weather. Rec'd!! 
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
Thanks obf...
I found out late yesterday afternoon that I can't start chemo until next Wednesday. I have one more consultation at the hospital before I can start.
It's cooling off here in Texas. We've actually had a fairly mild summer, thank goodness.