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[kitz]

I do apologise for all the recent and ongoing down time.  I was basically backed in a corner by my hosts to upgrading to a new server.  As you have probably noticed,, things do not appear to have gone well resulting in many hours of down time. 

Right now it seems that there iare so many things I need to fix.  The list seems endless and I'm completely overwhelmed.  There are so many areas I need to sort its hard trying to know what to do next, or even where to ask for help.  It is mostly cosmetic although the forum does keep crashing.  I'm not getting help from my hosts into finding a solution so Im trying to work through certain things myself.   I havent even had time to transfer my own mail over or do anything personal.  I literally have been sat here glued to the PC for the past 3 weeks not making much progress but please do bear with me as I try to sort what I can.

Ironically the upgrade was supposed to have more disk space and premium support, it seems to have been anything but with tickets sat unanswered for days/weeks and them not carrying out what should for them be simple tasks.

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Update 10th July

During the migration they appear to have changed the character set from UTF8 to Latin.  This is causing a problem with certain characters.  Please bear with me until I can sort this out.  Unfortunately there are several things I need to do before I can attempt to change this back.  More info in this thread here .

[Alex Atkin UK]

What really baffles me is how it seems the daily maintenance run is breaking the sessions tables every morning.

Given its not an insanely busy forum, the database shouldn't need optimising that often.

[kitz]

From what I can gather its possibly the temp file that needs increasing.  This server has more disk space than the old so it shouldnt be an issue if they can just change some settings in the mysql config file.

Now that Ive managed to mitigate a good chunk of those bots I could actually read the log file and be able to find the correct error message I was looking for. 
I'm still getting the china bots attempting to log in.  There were 1485 attempts in the 50 mins between the server going down and me recover from this mornings crash and I was able to find the message I was looking for.   Previously I was trying to wade through several hundred of thousands per hour. The log file was full of them. 

Thing is although I may have moved them out of the way by using a country list from ip2location, its a very long list of nrly 7200 lines added to my htaccess.. they are still going to be causing increased load in the background.   They are a real pest as there's still the ~1800 per hour triggering the ban list trying to log in or register.   It must be the new IP that has attracted them.   I honestly dread to think what it would be like if I didnt have measures in place.  Which lead to another thought...  why isnt my honey pot attracting a lot of those.  Thats something else that I need to check and see if that got broken during the move. They are causing a lot of unwanted traffic  :/

[Alex Atkin UK]

Thing is although I may have moved them out of the way by using a country list from ip2location, its a very long list of nrly 7200 lines added to my htaccess.. they are still going to be causing increased load in the background.

That's why its meant to be done via the firewall, it drops the packet before it reaches any servers that would exhibit load from the attempt.

Blocking China might be an idea, I wonder if this will do it?
https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/articles/4406468593687-How-to-block-countries-in-CSF-firewall

That note on VPS servers is an odd one, given my router is much weaker than my VPS.  I whitelist only EU and US on my pfSense port forwards and it handles it fine, it pretty much eliminated all hack attempts in my server log files.

[kitz]

At first I thought it was for cloudbased servers with seeing Cloudlynux on the LF side. However Ive looked and this option is not available even at admin.  There is the standard "Block IP", but that is one IP address at a time and after checking what that does, it just adds a deny on the .htacess.

The warning about not using on a VPS for countries concerned me as it made me think again about using that long list for China in htaccess.   There are quite a few more I need to add to my current list that ip2location doesn't have but Im seeing them attempting to login/register but being kicked as I have banned the IP range.  I need to convert these IP  blocks to a single line and add to the .htacess.

I've spent quite a lot of time trying to find ways of blocking them, that I could probably have done the ardous task of converting and adding to .htacess.  Its far too easy for me to get distracted and start looking at how to do rather than actually doing.   Its not helped that there is so many areas that I need to sort and Im switching between  again without seeming to get any further.


Im not looking forward to doing some of it....  and God knows how Im going to find time to do a new skin if I update SMF to their latest version.   This version is the most up to date at 2.0.19..  but the mammoth task of putting 2.1 is firstly getting rid of all the tapatalk stuff that wont install...  and then I have no idea what to do about the skin for 2.1.
Theres also the problem with languages obviously theyve moved me across using a different collation which is why the difficulty with certain characters not displaying properly.

Then theres the wiki to sort, again needing a new skin.... and then things on the main site with broken collation and a the broadband checker no longer works.   Everything is time consuming thingsI could do without.   My legs have suffered really badly spending time at the desk practically every hour for the past 3 weeks and Im beginning to really struggle.

Anyhow moaning about it doesnt get anything done.  If anyone is any good with SMF and or themes it would be great if someone was able to do a simple top head based on one of the default scemes but has the top blue header that contains the logo and the tab links.   Also if you are confident with cleaning up SMF and upgrading and are willing to give me some hand holding.   

I deliberately paid through the nose so that my hosts would do all the work I didnt feel well enough.Ive recently been diagnosed witha debilitating neuro disease. Over the past year or so spent weeks totalling months in hospital. Im just so overwhelmed right now at the amount of things that have got broken.

[kitz]

Ive had a reply to my ticket

try running the site via something like Cloudflare, and employing their anti-ddos systems, to block the flood even before it hits your server.

The table crashing doesn't look like /var is running out of space, as you have everything in 1 partition, which has ~20Gb free, and your database is only ~390Mb in size, so the only thing that springs to mind is that the sheer volume of accesses is causing the system to run out of memory and then the table is locked open, as a script has crashed while accessing it. Again, this would be fixed by reducing the hit count, via .htaccess or Cloudflare (with an eye on resource usage, I'd go for the Cloudflare option, as the server is a moderately lowspec one and you'd want to try to remove all extraneous resource usage on it, especially as it is running cPanel as well, (which can take up a lot of resources just by itself)

I really cant pay any more, I dont even know how Im going to pay for next year,  I paid it as I was backed into a corner not feeling well enough to handle a move.

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Note if anyone replies with pricing do NOT use the pound symbol or your post will fail.

[jid]

Kitz,

I spotted some of the posts and logged in to read into the troubles you've been having. I remember you used to host with Vidahost as you recommended them to me many years ago. I moved from TSO host sometime ago.

Dom and Seb from Vidahost are now working with Stablepoint hosting, perhaps worth reaching out to them and migrating away - as I've found them still very helpful.

Sorry I cannot be of much more help, but I thought I would pop a post to make you aware.

[kitz]

Thanks Jamie, nice to see you.  Ironically I briefly spoke with Dom a few months ago. I stumbled across Stablepoint when browsing for a future move  My hosting wasnt yet due to renewal  and I had about 6months left with TSO.  I actually had them in mind.  SP dont do any VPS but I was thinking of taking out one of their reseller accounts so I would still have Cpanel and extra disk space.
 
That was before TSO announced they were retiring the old Vidahost server racks though.  As I wasnt feeling up to handling a migration to another host thinking there would be work involved I stayed with TSO as they said they would handle everything for me.  They gave me a refund for the months Id paid in advance.. and deducted it off the cost of the new server which was vastly more expensive.  I really didnt feel I could cope with it right now as I have things going on.   I thought Id be buying time and I would move when Id sorted a few things out and after my daughters wedding.   As its turned out, the move has been really hard work.   Its meant to be a premium product with premium support.  Its dreadful.   The site can be down and you have absolutely no way of contacting them other than ticket that can go unanswered for days.  I tried their chat, but was told that he couldnt help and that I was already in the queue for the guys who deal with premium support to deal with. 

As you know I rated Vidahost highly, but since the taken by TSO and then by GoDaddy  its appalling. Ive had server moves before so I thought staying with the same company would be so easy for them to do.   

[jid]

Hi Kitz,

Likewise, it's been some years since I last popped in!

Is it worth contacting them and seeing if they can do something for you? Dom knows this site from Vida days perhaps they could help migrate you?

I imagine they're cheaper than TSO, it was one reason as well as the poor support why I made the move.

Sorry I cannot be of any help but I do know what you mean in terms of support with TSO Host. I found the support never responded to me and it almost sounds like now you've paid they aren't interested. They seem to have left you in a big mess by the sounds of it. Do you have any backups from the old server before it was shut down? To see if it's salvagable even in its old state to migrate "cleanly". CPanel accounts can be migrated with one click to my knowledge, it's what Stablepoint did for me anyway, admittedly this site is much much bigger.

Certainly worth reaching out to Stablepoint to see if they can in any way assist/it's something they can assist with?

[kitz]

Yes its been a while I hope that you and your family are keeping well.    Are you still local or have you moved away?  I wouldnt be surprised if you have, a lot of people I know have escaped     You must also have graduated long ago now.  My gawd the years fly.

Yes I may well have backups, I took a lot, but then dumped them all in a folder when I thought the migration had gone through.    They would be missing quite a lot of days though now.

I sent in a support ticket this morning and wonder never cease, they actually answered it today with the above message.  I replied saying they'd left me in a mess and I just couldnt afford to throw any more money into it.  I actually said I felt like they had dropped me in it at a time when I felt like I had no option but to letting them supposedly deal with it and how much stress and upset it had caused.  I got a reply back in a couple of hours (wonders never cease again especially on a Sunday) with a link to the free cloudfair for communities and saying he thought that if I could get rid of this massive China overhead it would stop the server outages.   It still doesnt explain a lot of the other things though such as the char set.     Im just tired of it.   Im supposed to be sorting something for my daughters wedding but not doing too well on that as I cant damn well concentrate.

[Chrysalis]

Sadly it all points to the same thing, them doing a bad job.

Innodb would help on the mysql side, if not and for some reason you have to keep using myisam, then yes they should be properly configuring the database server to handle things like temporary data properly, at the very least have a look how it was configured on the old server and carry the settings across.  Character issue is very likely down to character set (UTF8 support), Cloudflare can do filtering on a free account (its even turned on by default and configurable), and you can also do regional filtering via iptables (firewall) natively on the server.

All these things any competent remote hands service should be able to handle, and I dont think I am the only one frustrated with how you have been treated,

The thing to be wary of with cloudflare though is you do have to give them control of your DNS, so them handling the A records, although you will be able to edit them as normal, just will be done from their control panel.  They will on migration automatically configure it to match the existing DNS configuration to make the process easier.

[kitz]

We are back.   
What can I say?
Unfortunately I'm not actually any further forward, I never got around trying to sort tapatalk, nor the UFT8 problem with the characters and now theres something else that still needs more time to completely fix.

I blamed myself for a day thinking Id not got a backup when I actually did have.  Each full forum backup takes ~55 mins as its that big and I literally only had completed   the last one when I managed to crash the forum. I blamed myself for not doing another before updating another mod.  As it turned out I had a couple of partials. The partial backups didnt quite work anyhow so there been manual editing and help from smf guys as I didnt really know how to get things working again. The culprit was a mod written in php8.  Dont ask me why the forum had special treatment being set up with php7.3.33. The wiki and the main site arent. The old server was 7.4 something.  Someone would probably got it done a hell of a lot faster than me but I kept triple checking what I was doing and fighting my fingers.

I could type more, but theres no point, Im exhausted and there still some non computer things that need doing before tomorrow morning.

[ads]

We are back.   
What can I say?
Unfortunately I'm not actually any further forward, I never got around trying to sort tapatalk, nor the UFT8 problem with the characters and now theres something else that still needs more time to completely fix.

I blamed myself for a day thinking Id not got a backup when I actually did have.  Each full forum backup takes ~55 mins as its that big and I literally only had completed   the last one when I managed to crash the forum. I blamed myself for not doing another before updating another mod.  As it turned out I had a couple of partials. The partial backups didnt quite work anyhow so there been manual editing and help from smf guys as I didnt really know how to get things working again. The culprit was a mod written in php8.  Dont ask me why the forum had special treatment being set up with php7.3.33. The wiki and the main site arent. The old server was 7.4 something.  Someone would probably got it done a hell of a lot faster than me but I kept triple checking what I was doing and fighting my fingers.

I could type more, but theres no point, Im exhausted and there still some non computer things that need doing before tomorrow morning.

<3

[Dwight]

We are back.   
What can I say?
Unfortunately I'm not actually any further forward, I never got around trying to sort tapatalk, nor the UFT8 problem with the characters and now theres something else that still needs more time to completely fix.

I blamed myself for a day thinking Id not got a backup when I actually did have.  Each full forum backup takes ~55 mins as its that big and I literally only had completed   the last one when I managed to crash the forum. I blamed myself for not doing another before updating another mod.  As it turned out I had a couple of partials. The partial backups didnt quite work anyhow so there been manual editing and help from smf guys as I didnt really know how to get things working again. The culprit was a mod written in php8.  Dont ask me why the forum had special treatment being set up with php7.3.33. The wiki and the main site arent. The old server was 7.4 something.  Someone would probably got it done a hell of a lot faster than me but I kept triple checking what I was doing and fighting my fingers.

I could type more, but theres no point, Im exhausted and there still some non computer things that need doing before tomorrow morning.

Thank you from all the members for all the hard work! 
Self generated or not it must be quiet a struggle and steep learning curve.
Keep up the good work!
Dwight

[Alex Atkin UK]

I hope you don't mean were still stuck on PHP 7, this could be a real problem given its out of support so any security bugs wont get patched.

I've been lucky, everything I've written myself has continued to work on newer PHP versions, with the exception of moving from mysql to mysqli.