For the past couple of days the forums have been out of commission. The cause was traced to a brute force hack attempt which overloaded and crashed the server.

The 4x4Wire.com portal is still out of commission but the forums are back!

Good to know. I thought it was just me that couldn't access the site. This place is awesome!

Thank you!

In most 15 years on-line, this is the third hack that has brought the site down. With each time, we have come back to continue our open forum.

And, a few changes are now in process. 4x4wire and our sister sites 4x4voice, MUIRNet.net and OutdoorWire will continue to bring news and information forward about 4x4 recreation and the on-going fight to keep public lands open.

Enjoy to forums.

A little more information....

A review of the log files indicates that there has been an on-going brute force hack against the site for several days. It began with a brute force attack against the mail server section and moved on to overload calls to the web server.

One effort to reduce overall server loading involved implementing a
"cloud" caching for frequently called files. Overall, this should improve performance. However, it will take a little time to populate the cloud cache with frequently called files.

While that helps, there is a residual issue that indexing bots are hitting the site hard to crawl through the file structure to find files to index. Google is by far the biggest consumer of server resources during the indexing efforts. However, google bots to respect settings to limit the time between crawls thus reducing server load.

That leaves three other indexing severs -- Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex; none of which respect setting to limit time between crawls.

Yandex is fairly easy to deal with as it is the Russian equivalent of google. Blocking them from access has improved the server situation. Bing and Yahoo (both using Microsoft based bots) are more problematic. As much as I would like, I cannot block them as there is an index cross reference to ensure validity of site indexed. As a result, there are going to be times when server load increases and users will experience time-out errors.

Couple that with site backups that occur every night, the chance for receiving a timeout is increased. Backups start about 11 PM Pacific time. That has not been a problem in the past but it is under consideration for moving back at least an hour.

Aside from the forums, I do have several Joomla based websites. Those are in the process of being upgraded to reduce potential server loading.

Finally, there will be a long delayed and much needed upgrade to the forums software to a less server intensive version. That will involve a level of complexity that will require server down-time of at least 24 hours.

Advance notice will be provided when that effort is started. If you want to see what the newer version looks like, check out http://www.outdoorwire.com. That is my test site to check out the new features available.

Thanks for the info on what caused the blackout..

Pretty amazing about the load the search engine indexing servers put on sites.. Back when it was just Google guess it wasn't so bad.. and they seem to stick to the "Do no harm" philosophy.. Crazy about the others...

I remember the hack some years back that injected malicious code onto some of the home pages..

On Tuesday, we expect to be doing an install that will update MUIRNet.net and fully bring back 4x4wire.com portal.

The forums appear to be stable and few access time issues. I do not expect any server disruption... But, it is a computer and s#}{ does happen.

By this time tomorrow, I expect the upgrades will have been completed with no issues....

Testing, testing.

Okay, the runaway server process appear to have ended and things appear to work...

its 9/06 and I'm having a hell of atime getting on 4x4 wire is it me or the or ??????????? what????? ... At a point to give up .........????????????

Should be working now...

Found a couple maleware files embedded that were causing problems.