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Open Thread - 09-05-25 - Loose Ends

Submitted by JtC on Fri, 09/05/2025 - 8:40am

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.

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