Are we having an event?

[Doug Shepard]

Friday - 6:38PM and accessing SMC is excruciatingly slow - like dialup speed or worse. I'm using Comcast internet and have 4 other browser windows open on other sites. Those all seem to be working fine (normal speed). Tried firing up a fresh browser window to access SMC but it didn't change anything. Anybody else having problems?

[Lee DeRaud]

Yup, same thing out here in the Real World.

[Bruce Page]

Friday - 6:38PM and accessing SMC is excruciatingly slow - like dialup speed or worse. I'm using Comcast internet and have 4 other browser windows open on other sites. Those all seem to be working fine (normal speed). Tried firing up a fresh browser window to access SMC but it didn't change anything. Anybody else having problems?
I'm having the same problem. Tried rebooting to no avail. I'm also on comcast - I wonder it they're having problems.

[Karl Laustrup]

No, it's not just you on Comcast. I'm on Charter and mine is slow. Times out sometimes. Mine's been like this since early this morning.

Karl

[Anthony Anderson]

mine's working fine.

[Keith Outten]

I just checked and it appears that we are being attacked by the Search Engine Bots. I will discuss this with Aaron, we do have the capability to ban them from crawling SMC.

[Don Baer]

I have been having the same thing. Seems to be better for the moment.

[John Shuk]

What are search engine bots?

[Andy Hoyt]

I've been suffering up here in the top right corner for the past few days too.

Log on everything is fine and speedy for a half hour or so. Then it gets stuck in some wicked awful molasses. Walk away for an hour and then everything is peachy for another 30 minutes. Over and over.

How is it that the search bots (whatever they are) do this?

[Keith Outten]

Search Engine Bots...

The simple answer is that they are programs that search web sites for information, this is one of the ways Google and Yahoo load up their engines. They send out their web crawlers (Bots) and extract information from a domain, these are generally keyed to the keywords and other information that most web sites have imbedded in the HTML code just for the Bots.

.

[Randy Moore]

Aaron,

I tried to log on early this afternoon. I took me 20 minutes to get one post half way opened up.:( I said the heck with it and went to a fishing forum similar to SMC. Had no problem there. :) Hope this goes away or you and Keith get this taken care of .

TIA
Randy

[Scott Donley]

I think we had an event today ! Talk about withdrawl :)

[Ernie Nyvall]

Yep, same here, and I was just now able to get on starting from about 5 am. I guess with dial-up, it just wouldn't load at all because I left and came back an hour later and it was still sitting there.

Ernie

[Keith Burns]

Man this was a terrible day, no SMC until now:)

[Brad Schmid]

Oh the horror! I was desperate all day to search for some info here. I must've hit refresh several hundred times... Makes one realize what a good resource we have here.

[Ernie Nyvall]

Man this was a terrible day, no SMC until now:)


I hear you Keith... I had to go to caffeinated coffee to make it through.:eek: :D

Ernie

[Steve Clardy]

Yea. Just got on. Been trying since 7:30 am.
Need my fix.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

I don't know what's worse......quiting smoking or going half a day without SMC!:D

[Bill Lewis]

Whew, at least it wasn't just me! I was starting to get worried.

[Frank Chaffee]

Well I wasn't shaking... not much anyway.
Frank

[Keith Outten]

I don't know what happend today, I came home from work and the SMC server was totally locked up. I was unable to log-in directly and the mail service was also down. I had to do a hard boot to bring the server back online.

Aaron...we obviously have a problem that needs attention. Hardware or software?

I will be out this evening probably untill 9pm EST so if the server goes down it will be after 9 until I will be back in my shop office. Possibly Aaron wil have the problem diagnosed by then.

.

[Mark Rios]

Well, I know that there are problems with servers sometimes BUT......I paid $6 for the site for this year and I figure that SMC owes me 1.8 cents for the down time. I will expect a Paypal notice telling me that the refund is on the way. I was hoping that Keith and Jackie didn't take all our donations and head to Tahiti to live out their days on our money.




:D :D :D :D :D :D

Okay, Okay....Just teeasing. Thanks for getting us back up Keith. I was hoping that we would be back connected again soon and that there wasn't too bad of a bug in the works. Looks like Aaron has some plumbing to do here at the Creek. Thanks to you too Aaron.

[Steve Clardy]

Well, I know that there are problems with servers sometimes BUT......I paid $6 for the site for this year and I figure that SMC owes me 1.8 cents for the down time. I will expect a Paypal notice telling me that the refund is on the way. I was hoping that Keith and Jackie didn't take all our donations and head to Tahiti to live out their days on our money.




:D :D :D :D :D :D

Okay, Okay....Just teeasing. Thanks for getting us back up Keith. I was hoping that we would be back connected again soon and that there wasn't too bad of a bug in the works. Looks like Aaron has some plumbing to do here at the Creek. Thanks to you too Aaron.


I like it:eek: ;) :D

Ebay has had problems yesterday and this morning. Tried loading pictures off and on for hours. Finally got them loaded a while ago.

[Stu Ablett in Tokyo Japan]

Boy what a relief!

It was slow as could be over the weekend, and down last night, nice to see it back!

Cheers!

[Aaron Koehl]

Hopefully nothing serious.. I am currently looking into the problem.

[Dennis Peacock]

Hopefully nothing serious.. I am currently looking into the problem.

Aaron,

You just need a "serious" Unix box to drop SMC on is all!!! Maybe something like an ES40 Alpha box with 8GB of memory, four 1.1GHz processors, and a light load of disk space, like around 1.2TB or so. :rolleyes: :D

[Karl Laustrup]

Excruciatingly slow this morning at 4:30. I usually fly through the pages at this time of day. It's taking on average nearly a minute to bring a page up. Must be something going on somewhere to be causing all this slowdown.

Karl

[Keith Outten]

Karl,

It has to be a problem with our server. SMC is very slow this morning even in my shop office which is on the local LAN with the server, that eliminates most of the wide area network issues. Inbound traffic seems to be very light based on the router activity this morning and yet SMC is very slow.

[tod evans]

i`ve kicked the ol` boxspring up in the tree we use for an antenna every way possible and still can`t get smc to come in without static??????

[John Miliunas]

Aaron,

You just need a "serious" Unix box to drop SMC on is all!!! Maybe something like an ES40 Alpha box with 8GB of memory, four 1.1GHz processors, and a light load of disk space, like around 1.2TB or so. :rolleyes: :D

Hmmmm...I forget if I sold it at a rummage sale or not but, I'll dig around and see if I can't find my very formidable TI99-4A, which I'd be happy to send over to you guys. :D :cool:

[Andy Hoyt]

Hey! There's a brand new D8 Cat down the street for sale. Should work great, but I don't think UPS is gonna be able to handle the shipping.

[Steve Clardy]

i`ve kicked the ol` boxspring up in the tree we use for an antenna every way possible and still can`t get smc to come in without static??????


:D :D :D :D :D :D
Them thar box springs don't receive very good when the rain gets them wet tod:rolleyes: ;) :D

[tod evans]

:D :D :D :D :D :D
Them thar box springs don't receive very good when the rain gets them wet tod:rolleyes: ;) :D

no rain but the darn coons have been up to no good out there..02 tod

[Steve Clardy]

no rain but the darn coons have been up to no good out there..02 tod

Yer killing me tod!!:D :D :D :D :D

[tod evans]

soooooo aaron, didja shoot the coons or what? seems to be working again.

[Mark Rios]

no rain but the darn coons have been up to no good out there..02 tod


THAT'S WHAT IT IS!!!!! The 'coons are hijacking the bandwidth for gaming. They must have the new forest sim, "'Coons rule the underbrush". I hear it's all the rage with the critters in your parts.

[Cecil Arnold]

Tod, you might try some aluminum foil on the box springs, works for me.

[Keith Outten]

This morning Jackie found a thread at WoodNet that was linked to one of the pictures in our Turning Forum. Every time anyone at WoodNet viewed this particular thread SMC bandwidth was used. This has added a huge number of Guests and is draining our resources.

This is one of the reasons why we are so strict about linking to pictures we host and external links in general. I expect as we continue to look even further we will find many more cases of external links to pictures we are hosting. I will ask Aaron to immediately disable picture viewing by Guests. When this happens only SMC Members will be able to view pics, I hate to do this but it is impossible for us to host attachments for the global Internet.

[tod evans]

so it`s okay to send jeb and his mess of blue-ticks home?????

[Keith Outten]

Tod,

Let the blue-ticks rest, here is an update.

Aaron prefered to attack this problem another way. He has configured our server to send the SawMill Creek logo to any site that links to any attachment here at SMC. Of course he has added a little jab, see the picture below. We are still seeing lots of traffic so there may be lots of MyBad graphics showing up all over the web right now...or we could still have a problem at the Creek. Aaron thinks our network card may be responsible for some of the issues. We shall see.

[tod evans]

man! i send ol` jeb-n-the hounds home and now they`re at it again:mad: , or is this happinin` in suburbia too?

[Steve Clardy]

man! i send ol` jeb-n-the hounds home and now they`re at it again:mad: , or is this happinin` in suburbia too?

Same here. Having trouble all over the net.:(

[tod evans]

everything else here is fine? just smc........guess keith needs to get the shotgun oiled up?

[Andy Hoyt]

Not sure 'bout stuff down in the big city (Benton - pop. 89), but here in the suburb of Benton Falls (pop. 19) it's just peachy.

[Ernie Nyvall]

Yep, SMC had an attack again out here. Everythng else was fine.

Ernie

[Bill Lewis]

Yep, just minutes after Keith posted his latest update, it bogged. I started a reply, but got nowhere. Seems to be ok now.

[Mark Stutz]

Keith,
I'm getting the SMC logo in place of thumbnails in all the forums.

Mark

[Bernie Weishapl]

I am getting the same thing. Every thumbnail I try to look at is SMC logo.

[Keith Outten]

I hope Aaron will be able to resolve the problem today.

[Karl Laustrup]

It seems to be working OK this morning. And even yesterday afternoon it was OK. Whatever needs to be done to keep it this way. Thanks Keith, Aaron et all.

Karl

[Ken Fitzgerald]

What's interesting....my home computer won't show photos..just the SMC logo.....my work computer was as of last evening showing photos.....they both use XP.......both use a firewall (different firewalls, however)........both use Norton................the one difference I can think of....I've never posted a photo using my laptop...........?

[Aaron Koehl]

I implemented a temporary solution to prevent hotlinking (bandwidth stealing). Apparently, there are more members than I thought whose browsers rewrite GET request headers, so I will have to switch to another method.

Pictures should be working fine now for those who were unnecessarily inconvenienced..

[John Miliunas]

I implemented a temporary solution to prevent hotlinking (bandwidth stealing). Apparently, there are more members than I thought whose browsers rewrite GET request headers, so I will have to switch to another method.

Pictures should be working fine now for those who were unnecessarily inconvenienced..

Ahhhh...So I take it you won't be needing that powerhouse of a 99-4/A, huh??? :rolleyes: :D :cool: (Prolly way before your time anyway! :D )

[Ken Fitzgerald]

And..........as alway.........Thank You Aaron for all you do!

[Scott Donley]

And..........as alway.........Thank You Aaron for all you do!What Ken said ! Now all I have to do is try to remember all the changes I made and undo them since none of them worked anyway :)