The site is under attack

Discuss general Uzebox topics here: features, wish list. nice to have, etc.
User avatar
uze6666
Site Admin
Posts: 4801
Joined: Tue Aug 12, 2008 9:13 pm
Location: Montreal, Canada
Contact:

The site is under attack

Post by uze6666 »

We are under attack from web crawlers or something else. All those 600+ guests are certainly no real users, There's no new buzz about the uzebox on the net that can justify this. These A-holes are leeching 5Gbytes+ per days lately! :evil:

I will try to block all bots as best as i can and if it doesn't work I will disable guests account until I find a fix. Real users will need to register.
User avatar
mapes
Posts: 174
Joined: Sun Feb 13, 2011 7:04 am
Location: Seattle

Re: The site is under attack

Post by mapes »

I am not a bot. But I like to see how the uzebox community is without logging in. I like to read the on goings on jubations video modes and waiting for updates from nicksen. I usually don't log on because I am way behind the curve from the normal community on the forum.

I tried to find some of the code I worked on when I was trying to customize Dr Mario for the uzebox jamma. There was a bug I couldn't figure out which I wanted to fix after several years of waiting. I did find the code for the dalaks games which used video modes 9. Dalaks is based off the Dr. Who series, but was a game I played on my 8086 way back in 80s and I got a hand me down 286 with ega graphics. Maybe I will try to work on it again and put it out.
User avatar
uze6666
Site Admin
Posts: 4801
Joined: Tue Aug 12, 2008 9:13 pm
Location: Montreal, Canada
Contact:

Re: The site is under attack

Post by uze6666 »

Of course not all those guests are bots. :) But a it has ramped up like crazy in the past month. We are talking like 7gigs a month for some user. Way more than real users would consume. I will restore it when I figure out what is going on and resolve the issue with IP range blocking or else.

Btw, I can't remember for sure, but didn't you tried to work on a racing game once? I remember making a custom sound driver for someone to reproduce the engine revving. Sounded pretty good.
User avatar
Artcfox
Posts: 1382
Joined: Thu Jun 04, 2015 5:35 pm
Contact:

Re: The site is under attack

Post by Artcfox »

That sucks that bots are leeching so much bandwidth. The thing that I'm not sure how to solve is bots registering accounts and posting spam.
User avatar
Jubatian
Posts: 1563
Joined: Thu Oct 01, 2015 9:44 pm
Location: Hungary
Contact:

Re: The site is under attack

Post by Jubatian »

Wow... That bandwidth figure. Seriously, are we keeping up infrastructure for human beings or this ridicule trying to find loopholes to drop a load of spam posts (e-mails, whatever) everywhere? If bandwidth is starting to become a problem I seriously don't know what we could be doing at all. Apart from hurling more funds at server costs just to keep it up against that crap so the few occasional human visitors had a chance.

Checking the member list, more than half of the users have zero posts, and a lot of such names pretty much look like they fell out of a random number generator. Most have quite some likelihood to be leftovers from bots. Who actually has at least one post is of course usually somebody who is or at least was interested at some point - we have about 500 such members :)

Where most of that traffic landed by the way (if it is visible)? Evenly spread out, or maybe attempting to register? Maybe if the forum was kept closed for a few weeks it would flush out of most of these bots' caches. Then registration might be kept disabled. Or set up to require admin approval.
User avatar
uze6666
Site Admin
Posts: 4801
Joined: Tue Aug 12, 2008 9:13 pm
Location: Montreal, Canada
Contact:

Re: The site is under attack

Post by uze6666 »

You can check the stats for the site. I don't have much more info available I think. I can't understand why the forums and possibly the wiki and other pages are hammered like that. Makes no sense, maybe some bots found a weakness in the PHP code and is exploiting it somehow. Maybe the crawlers tries to download all files, dunno.

Anyway, if you look at the stats, for nov 21 it dropped like crazy, just after I disabled guests.
Attachments
stats_nov.pdf
(2.28 MiB) Downloaded 490 times
User avatar
mapes
Posts: 174
Joined: Sun Feb 13, 2011 7:04 am
Location: Seattle

Re: The site is under attack

Post by mapes »

I used to be an assistant administrator for a friend's server he had at his house back in the early to mid 2000s. He had over time the boys saturated their php mail server and some how back doored a way to put torrent filed on it. Eventually we shut the server down and just used dr see dreamhost instead. When it was offline, we found tons of junk on the server.

I never worked on a racing game, but I tried making a few games. I started gforce, which was a galaga game, but ran into limitations, I tried to make a river raid game but couldn't get the seeded random level generator to work correctly.

I did put out a finished arcade version of megatris, which works great but it has 1 audio artifact that I can't figure out how to solve. It is the most played game, and Dr mario on my arcade machine.
CunningFellow
Posts: 1445
Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2013 8:08 am
Location: Brisbane, Australia

Re: The site is under attack

Post by CunningFellow »

@mapes - do you want a hand to try get Galaga going on the Uzebox?
User avatar
mapes
Posts: 174
Joined: Sun Feb 13, 2011 7:04 am
Location: Seattle

Re: The site is under attack

Post by mapes »

@cunningfellow

It has been a very long time since I looked at the code for it. Plus I had a friend back then who was able to help me with the programing, he is a car major while I am an electrical engineer. I did post the code and graphics on the forum.

When I was writing the game I was thinking of the uzebox jamma.

But now I would rather do the river raid game or two other games I really loved for the intellivision. Advanced dungeons and dragons (clody mountain) or Space Spartans using an expansion voice chip. (A separate atmega chip).

Space Spartans was amazing when I was a kid, and still does with all the controls it had.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how I would begin either of those projects.
User avatar
uze6666
Site Admin
Posts: 4801
Joined: Tue Aug 12, 2008 9:13 pm
Location: Montreal, Canada
Contact:

Re: The site is under attack

Post by uze6666 »

Space Spartans was amazing when I was a kid, and still does with all the controls it had.
+1 for Space Spartans!

I don't think you'd need another chip for the voice. The simplest would be to have a SD file with all the words sampled in it and just stream them Uzeamp style. I would be glad to help you with that. More hardcore would be to implement some phoneme voice synthesizer with samples either from flash of from the SD. Something I've always wanted to have a try at. But I guess to have it sound decent would be a heck of a lot of work.
Post Reply