The Swamp

Woohoo!

I just wasted a good hunk of a day, but I got the damn Swamp running again.

I'm not really sure what went wrong, but somehow things got corrupted. I had to restore the site from a backup. That then produced a different error, but creating a new DB account and then deleting the phpbb cache directory seems to have done the trick.

I hope this doesn't continue to fail regularly...

Nice work. Again. Thanks Dave.

It's only one failure, right? The other two times it was shutdowns by the host company, iirc.

(And didn't I warn y'all mfers about talking all that shit about the russians?)

Is there anything we can do as a group here? Is it a Phpbb thing or an ASO thing? Surely we can move the site to a company that's a little easier to work with. I have no tech background but am willing to help with whatever I can.

howard wrote:Nice work. Again. Thanks Dave.

It's only one failure, right? The other two times it was shutdowns by the host company, iirc.

(And didn't I warn y'all mfers about talking all that shit about the russians?)

I don't think they shut us down this time. We didn't have any support tickets this time. I did find a spamreport file on the site that I guess they created that indicated that we had another infected file that had sent some spam a couple of days ago. I deleted that file. But I don't think they shut us down for that.

However, whatever tool is putting infected files on our site may have corrupted one of the files we actually need. I really don't know how to keep that from happening short of paying some security expert to audit our site.

One thing I'd like to do is update our phpbb again. We are one minor version behind. I might do that one evening here while all y'all are asleep.

That is what I meant, this time, yesterday, was the only failure/bug, whereas ASO cut off the lights two previous times, once last week and once about two months ago. And wasn't there another time about two years ago ASO changed something that resulted in a short outage?

Pretty good record, only one software/bug related failure in recent years. Especially with the updates you've installed. You are doing a great job, we all appreciate it.

we never sleep!

seriously though, do we another donation cycle?

degenerasian wrote:we never sleep!

seriously though, do we another donation cycle?

We have some money in the account if we need it, but sounds like for now the best use would be to figure out a way to buy Dave a beer.

I just hope I score higher in Jerloma's rankings this year. Fingers crossed!

at least you were ranked.

great job! just in time too.

Time for another phpbb upgrade?

Been a few years since we got this bad boy.

Rush2112 wrote:Time for another phpbb upgrade?

Been a few years since we got this bad boy.

Dave did a major upgrade recently. We're only a minor version behind, so it's a little more trivial to upgrade at this point. Hopefully that resolves whatever the issue is.

brian wrote:

Rush2112 wrote:Time for another phpbb upgrade?

Been a few years since we got this bad boy.

Dave did a major upgrade recently. We're only a minor version behind, so it's a little more trivial to upgrade at this point. Hopefully that resolves whatever the issue is.

Yeah, we're at 3.1.8 and the current is 3.1.9. I actually tried to do the update while it was down today, but it wasn't going to work until I got the site working again.

brian wrote:

Rush2112 wrote:Time for another phpbb upgrade?

Been a few years since we got this bad boy.

Dave did a major upgrade recently. We're only a minor version behind, so it's a little more trivial to upgrade at this point. Hopefully that resolves whatever the issue is.

Right on. Must have missed that, but I'm American, I'm not supposed to be paying attention.

Merci beaucoup, Shirlier

Damn Russians.

Thanks for getting it back up. Again.

Testing, testing.

For those who didn't see it, we were getting an error when you tried to post a message.

It seems that one of our php files had its permissions changed such that it couldn't be read. Something is still fucking with our site.

I fixed it, but this will probably happen again...

thanks

test

Dave fixed it again.

brian wrote:Dave fixed it again.

He's not to bad for a Trump supporter.

Test from Spain...

Thanks Dave.

Checked in a couple of times yesterday, and thought the place was especially dead for a Sunday. No wonder.

OK, this is getting really old. I have fixed it again. Someone should have emailed me it was down!

I've been traveling, so I haven't had a lot of time to check the Swamp or Facebook. When I saw the Swamp was down again yesterday, I tried to fix it, but I've been having serious problems with my laptop since I had to update to the Windows 10 anniversary update. It takes forever to do anything now, and I simply didn't have the time. I'm back in the states again now, but about to be in the car for 2-3 days, so if it happens again, I may not be able to fix it.

Once I'm back to regular life, I'm going to take some time with Brian and Sabo to show them how to fix the issue.

I'm also going to open a ticket with ASO to see if they can help me track down who/what is changing our file permissions.

Shirley out.

Thanks, Shirley!

Thanks man! Sorry you have to continually do this.

Every swamper owes dave a few beers.

Thanks Dave!

thanks Dave

Thanks Dave. I was really missing all of you.

Dave, you're a hero.

This time I fixed it on my iPhone while driving (riding) on I-64 just east of Lexington. Hey AB!

This is like a really annoying boss fight for you, right?

Curse of the chubby Chinese beach volleyball player.

Phineas J. Whoopie (Dave) you're the greatest!




(Anyone get that reference from memory?)
(I mean, besides Howard.)

well, gee san carlos. Other folks thought the 21st Century would bring us flying cars. I'm waiting for my 3DBB.

The fucking site is back yet again. I thought the whole html directory had been deleted this time, but it turns out it was just file permissions again. Permissions on the root dir.

I fixed those.

Also, I'm currently chat with ASO support. He ran a scan of the site and found some trojan horse files in old places - trash and old frog@sportsfrog.com email files. I deleted those.

I just spent some time searching through every file on the site and fixing a number of files that had had trojan horse code injected in them. There were a few purely trojan horse files as well (files that weren't part of phpbb). There were more infected files than I realized - and ASO's scans hadn't found them all.

I've learned my lesson about declaring any sort of victory, but I have some hope now. I think I've actually eradicated this thing from our files. Right now. I hope to hell he/she/it doesn't have an easy way back in to start this all over again.

If you see it down, or giving any sort of errors, let me know via email. It's daveirwin, plus the number 1, at Google's mail service.

Fuckers

Testing with brand new phpbb...

Working now. about 10 minutes ago it said "no board available".

Finger crossed.