No OB late last night

[BikerDoc5968]

Not having anything to do with this thread but is there something about you gals from Oregon and quilting that the rest of us don't know about Or are going to fill us in on the BIG secret...that is if there is a secret???? Just curious

[quiltergal]

Secret? What secret? We really work for the CIA and quilting and orchid growing is just our cover. Seriously though Carol and I are friends and met through a quilting group years ago. We've been "sisters of the cloth" ever since. Now when we chit chat about orchids at our quilt group the others think we're speaking a foreign language! We are plotting to take on our local orchid society who are seriously hospitality challenged.

[BikerDoc5968]

Well, now the cat's out of the bag!!!! Very nice to know, thanks

[quiltingwacko]

It's just another infectious disease Doc!

[Chubidubi]

[bellini girl]

OMG , so it wasn't my service provider why I could not access OB last night. I clicked the refresh button quite feverishly then went to bed. what else was there to do. Surely not the tube...duh.

Lecent

[Marty]

the problem was actually pretty serious on the server. Seems that someone out there was spoofing orchidboard.com and sending out spam. Just for the record it wasn't 'other forums' or any orchid terrorists, just pesky spammers doing their usual. Our server got completely bogged down. NOrmally our load is at less then 1 and things work just fine. When the server went down our load was at 800 I had to call the hosting company to physically go and flip the switch so I could log in and see where the problem was.

For the techies....Say someone sends out a million messages and they spoof our domain name (tricks the system into thinking that the messages are sent by someone from @orchidboard.com ie ross@orchidboard.com). When half a million of the messages don't get delivered they come right back to our server. Our server will then work hard to try to re-deliver these messages. Spammer gets their V|@GR@ mail delivered and we end up dealing with the bogged down server. Or in this case, lack of a server. I installed a service that automatically deletes any message that bounce back that did not originate from our server. So now even if we get spoofed, we should be unaffected and stay up.

Just thought I'd fill you guys in on the problem we had. Of course, I was watching our little guy when this happened so I could not do a thing until the Mrs. got home... then took a while to figure things out...that's why it was down for so long and that's why the next day I had 10 cups of tea

[cb977]

Thanks Marty

[Dorothy]

Thanks for the explanation and all the work you doing keep the OB afloat
You are the bestest

I know you used Ross as an example because he's your favorite ..

[camille1585]

Originally Posted by Dorothy

Thanks for the explanation and all the work you doing keep the OB afloat
You are the bestest

I completly agree with that! Thanks Marty, for fixing problems and making this place better and better. I really hate spammers!