Topic: Is anyone having error 504? (Read 793 times)

Ah yes I seem to be being too ignorant for my own good at this stage... - nice spot!

I don't think there has been much errors recently (or at least ones I've noticed) this forum seems to be back up to quite a good speed.

Good to see you again Jack.

After exploring the accounts I am confident that hilariousandco and hilariousetc are alts to each others.
Ref: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=164822

I spotted another one which is hilarious*
Ref: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.44695485

So, to summarise: hilariousandco, hilariousetc and hilarious* are indeed alt to each others and I am 100% positive about it  

By the way: After the last 504 issues have we had any other server crashing?

sometime i also have issue with error 504 when login to forum, but reload and wait a little bit, every thing is oke.

Interesting take on it, but im not sure about post per block, even thread per block, I mean, as with everything in life, it is prone to exploits, in this case people could just spam the fuck out of it, I mean this forum is pretty fast paced already, so I have my doubts this would work out well. Perhaps more advanced members would have their "blocks" mined with a priority.. merit could act as a "fee" of sorts? im not sure, there are some good angles to research in the field of decentralizing a forum and protecting it against ddos. But then, if it becomes too complicated for noobs to get started and posting, someone else may just attack the niche with a classic forum and get traffic away from deflecting users of this forum in current form, ranking better in Google and then ending in ad revenue loss... very hard to balance things out here.

I think that's unlikely as hilariousandco was the first username I spotted (moderating bitcoin discussion) and hilarious is quite a common word.

They seem to be seperate people (but maybe I'm wrong)...

Thanks for the information. I am keeping it simple meaning they are alt to each others.

I could probably do quite a bit of the signatures stuff. The transmission would be what I struggle with though but that could already be sampled from the regular core.
As for the proof of work, that would be done whn you post, each post is a block and y'all get the score (or it could even be each topic is a block, you download the block, sign your new block, verify the entire block after checking the signatures of all the transactions/posts inside of that block/thread)...

The copies would need to be encrypted kind of like freenet style, and it decrypts as you log in.. the passes could be hashes that check in the blockchain so it's like keeping your private keys from bitcoin safe... just throwing in some ideas.

It could probably be done but im not a good enough coder to actually get it working. I would wait until we have sidechains, I don't really see people throwing in electricity for a PoW that only servers this forum, we need to take advantage of the BTC blockchain hashrate.

Too complicated so for now we'll have to deal with the ddosers the oldschool way.

Tor runs quite quickly on my computer.
My internet history is very long on firefox so when I put it to connect through tor it doesn't slow down very much.

I don't think theymos likes to hand out copies of the forum (as it opens up the potential for the site to gain phishing attempts).
The login stuff would still need to be done by the loginserver otherwise there would be a lot of issues (unless we get masternodes that moderators and legendaries can have which can allow users to autehnticate their way onto the website)...
All of the core devs also seem to have ditched bitcointalk so I'm not sure how kindly they'd take to a suggestion of hosting it.

Apparently there is a new .onion format that is very improved and works faster. But still, all the encryption and so on will always make things slower than clearnet. So this default slowness will make things as bad when ddos'd or even worse (even if ddossed have a harder time ddossing, it will still be effective)

Also the problem that theymos mentioned of unbanned IP's.

The solution is most likely a blockchain based forum. Perhaps with sidechains somehow we can use BTC's blockchain to host a forum? who knows. I just hope it doesn't require javascript. Cloudfare forces javascript and then add the google catpcha. Not good.

Ahh, I thought that the .onion versions of sites are generally a bit stronger as people are then limited to the speeds that tor can function at, meaning people that are further away from the DDoSers should be less affected by it (although I'm probably wrong).

And yes but I sense they're unlikely to do major updates of the system anytime soon, which is a shame, they'd also then have to start tracking people somewhat...

.onion is even worse for DDoS attacks because the clients are all anonymous, so you can't ban abusive IPs. That's why I haven't created a .onion, even though it would be very easy to do.

Tor needs to address this somehow. I've mentioned some ideas in the past.

It might be easier to make a dark web sersion of this site (.onion) so that we can access it during ddos attacks although I'm not sure whether that would work very well (having two instances of the same software/systems).

We should have a new BIP where bitcoin nodes broadcast bitcointalk topics and the site instead of using the main server so that people can put in "bitcointalk.org" and access their closest node .

They were trying various different things for several hours, but they stopped for now. I wouldn't be surprised if they try it again tomorrow, but I re-activated one of the systems which was part of my custom anti-DDoS setup before moving to Cloudflare, and that's been able to identify and block them so far.

DDoS attacks are back-and-forth affairs:
1. The attacker tries something.
2. Your automated systems handle it, or the site goes down until you manually figure out how to mitigate it.
3. The attacker tries something else.
4. Repeat until one side gets sick of it.


It's not my main area of interest, so I might never get around to it.

If I was interested in that, what I'd do is create an open source project which would basically replicate Cloudflare (plus improvements) by using your own AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. account. So you'd download the open source script, give it your cloud-provider credentials, and it'd set it all up for you, maybe even including a nice Web interface. It would create a small CDN of a few very-lightweight instances spread across the world, and automatically spin up more instances in the correct regions when the existing ones are overloaded. The instances would reverse-proxy your site, cache appropriately, keep track of IP reputation, sometimes insert challenges, etc. Costs would probably be higher than the cheaper Cloudflare plans, but much cheaper than Cloudflare Enterprise.

Also, that this sort of need exists shows that the Internet is fundamentally broken. PoW should be part of TCP, not a janky hack which requires hiding behind huge networks and probably accepting a MITM.

It looks like another batch of butthurts tries to disable the whole system. Maybe because of merits lol

I thought it was the configuration of the language code published by theymos making the forum down for about 3 hours. Or maybe the new bitcointalk forum or the badge system.

I wonder who are the no-lifers always attacking this forum. Perhaps they are Roger Ver related? they want to see this forum dead so bad so he can get all the traffic into his bitcoin dot com forum, similar to how he wants the bitcoin subreddit dead so traffic is sent to the btc subredddit, or ideally, taking control of it.

You always have to be alert because they will keep trying. As far as todays ddos, it has ruined any chances of me using the forum today, specially with Tor, the nodes were struggling, wereas in clearnet you had a chance to browse it in insanely slow mode.

I was being redirected to the cloudflare site earlier with the static version on it...


Yes, I think Theymos is too intelligent to fall for ddos attacks. Now i'm getting the hashcash redirection initially also (I think it's hashcash anyway).

Crypto related email addresses sell like hotcakes on the black market (as far as I understand it anyway). And if you can login to one, you can reset someone's password if you can't get it from the forum. Equally people have hashed passwords stored on this forum but there are certain ways to find some peoples' passwords if they're particularly weak.

I too had some problems with acces to forum, was thinking that it could be beacause of increased bot traffic. It seems that everything is working well at the moment.


As far as i have heard that this is one of the methods how hackers could gain acces to information which is stored to server..? like passwords.
Also as others have mentioned before, it could be an attemt to extort webpage owners if the server or admin cant handle the attack.

No script browser can pertain to any browser with a script blocker installed. As far as I know, it can stop bots because most of the times bots use no script browsers to do the repetitive tasks set by its user and enabling the checking your browser feature of Cloudflare makes them somehow unable to access the forum.
Can I assume that the DDoS attack is finally over now? Site response time is fast again.

Seems quick for me now but wasn’t able to get on at all today until now

Checking your browser is still on, but it's not a problem for me.
The interesting part in your answer is the following:

So theoretically it can stop bots, who spam nonsense posts forumwide? Does this work in practice as well?
Or those bots are not that kind of bots?

If noscript browser means e.g. tor browser, than I can understand that you don't like to use this checking your browser a lot, just when it's absolutely necessary.

It often happens lately.
I think this was the fourth time.
Am I the only one who noticed it?
Or Am I just the only one who has been experiencing it?

Is everything back to normal now? This is the first time I've been able to get on here today. Though it might be a DDOS. There are some vindictive people out there 

I suspected this was the reason after initial 30 minutes of not being able to access the site I decided to see if there was any update on twitter, last time in a similar situation we had gotten a update there. I'm glad the site is up and running for all, this is the second big Ddos attack on this site in two years, but im glad thermos got it up in time.

I was planning to take Ddos for my site but after reading this review I feel it's not worth to take it for my website thanks theymos for the detailed explanation.

It is working just fine for me now, I can say the forum is back for me.


Theymos would be gone if you bring the topic of "new forum" . Well cant blame him tho, i believe it is a hard thing to maintain a big forum like these,


Or maybe some competitor? This question would raise a lot of thing i guess, but i am not accusing someone here.

They are cousin brothers. 
Okay, I'm kidding. @hilariousetc is the alternative account of @hilariousandco. Or, @hilariousandco is the alternative account of @hilariousetc, but I think the first one is correct assuming @hilariousandco was created before and is in the DT, or has been a part of DT for a longer time, because I'm not sure if @hilariousetc is in the DT or not.

Yeah working fast and great again !
Refreshing and Threads opening have taken long but worked !
Only creating Posts or Quotes hasnt worked for me , but fine now again wooot  !

  

There was an DDos  attack on the site. So there was a problem in the server for 5 hours.  we all felt some problems. so we could not access your account. Now it's okay.

Some people find it fun to do it which is obviously bad for the victim.

PS: Just out of curiosity, is there any relationship between hilariousetc and hilariousandco?

Why don't you work on that after you're done with he new forum? I've always though cloudflare was crap. If something better can be made then I'm sure you could make a business out of it, or at the very least the forum would benefit.


Because they're dicks. Some people just get off on it and do it because they can. Sometimes people also do it in an extortion attempt: "pay up or we won't stop".

I can see the filtering is working. I am browsing the forum smoothly from last 15 minutes. Hope it's over for now until the attacker have their next move  

Why would someone DDos these forums? What could they possibly gain from doing this?

Glad to see everything working now, because I wasn't able to use the forums the past 3 hours.

Yes, It happened to my browser too.  Probably they are having some updates with the site that is why we'd experience that.  I thought I was the only one having that error that I had to turn my PC on and off for several times.

No, but for now I'm successfully filtering it.


CF stops all sub-layer-7 attacks, which is somewhat useful. But I was doing pretty well at stopping those on my own. What caused me to switch to Cloudflare in the first place was tens of thousands of IPs doing things which seemed indistinguishable from real-world traffic. For those layer-7 attacks, Cloudflare has been a mixed bag.

First of all, I can enable the "checking your browser" thing, and that stops almost all attacker traffic. But that also breaks noscript browsers and bots, so I don't like to do it too much. Skilled attackers can also sometimes get through that, though I think that it does require a proof-of-work.

Cloudflare is honestly not very good at detecting attack traffic. You'd think that they'd be able to detect things like a huge influx of IPs that are not the regular visitors, or IPs that are not used for regular traffic on any of CF's sites, or a bunch of weird request patterns that have never been done before in the history of the site. I feel like I'd be able to write this kind of general detection code if I had a year to dedicate to it, and I'm not a giant corporation. So that's a disappointment. But nobody else is better AFAIK. I talked to Incapsula at length, and their tech is AFAICT basically the same as Cloudflare, but a lot more expensive.

The main effect it has is that it can be adjusted to deal with an attack a lot easier than if you have your own custom system. It just saves a lot of work.

Has Cloudflare had an effect on DDOS attacks at all? I'm guessing there's been a few attempts since it was introduced, but we haven't noticed. I haven't used cloudflare, but I assume they let you know if there is an unusual amount of traffic happening?

I'm still finding the site a little sluggish, but not running into any errors or anything.

It's responding fast for me now.  DDoS attack over?

Weren't able to have a proper connection for 4-5 hours but as of right now it starting to look good but the problem I am having right now is even thought I don't get the Error 504 the pages of the forum seems that it takes a while to load but other than that BCT is fully accessible to me now.

Thanks on this information finally we have now a clear as a crystal information regarding the error that we encounter in a few minutes ago.

That was also in my mind that it might a DDoS attacked again, and thank you it is fixed now.

Good to see that our beloved forum is now back to normal.

I suspected so much.  I couldn't get on at all, and then the cloudfair backup would load.  It's probably not even worth the effort to try to pin down the IP address of the culprit. 

This seems a completely different one that we all have experienced. This means something related to the SSL of the website.

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Finally we have the confirmation. Yeah seems like ddos broke my life @hilariousandco 

DDoS ruins lives.

It's a DDoS.

It's coming back to life now.

Bots on suicide watch not being able to post/spam for couple of hours. 

Which last time? The most recent one was due to the query theymos had run...
 
My conclusions are based on the error codes I received during the time out. I didn't get 504, the error exactly stated Error 525: SSL handshake failed. However, I don't disagree that it also could be due to Ddos.

I thought im the only one experiencing this and makes me think maybe im banned. Lol. But its getting okay as of now.

During 3 hour's (Aprrox) unable to open. Just now open forum but still too slow. Perhaps ddos attack (IMO). Although I am using high speed internet but still forum loading is very low speed. As far as I know if cloudflare detect suspicious entry they disable website for few moment.

More like a DDoS (or at least something along with what @mdayonliner said). According to this page, the error 502 and 504 (what I'm getting all the time) means that the back-end servers are not communicating correctly.

"2. The server at the origin is overloaded or unreachable at the time the request was made. The could be due to the server crashing, traffic spikes, or lack of connectivity to the server."

And this is not the first time this happens. The last time it was also a DDoS attack.

Apparently it's over 3 hours so far that we are having the same issue. I am sure it's not the ddos (on the same page as Joel_Jantsen), it's not something with the language codes update as well since those were only the HTML tags.

It could be something to do with the Homographs update. When theymos added the additional script for the homographs check, he must left a glitch on the code. I am sure the script is checking all the characters individually to see if it is a match for the slimier letter for another language.

By the way, don't blame me if I am totally wrong since I do not have any idea about the sever config and all other factors related to the server we have the forum hosted.

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There is a 503 error as well which I encountered and this is not from cloudflare by the way.

I don't think it's Ddos.. As Cloudflare describes it


Maybe some miss-configuration theymos did while setting up the local language thingy? It's still very bad for me. I can barely access the website and takes about 10-20 reloads to open a page.

Well i got the cloudfare archive pages for me too. I hope that is the problem, because we dont want this


to happen. It is annoying indeed, and i hope it will be solved soon and nothing happen to our beloved forum.

ps. It is a good thing if there is an explanation after this incidence.

Probably a ddos.

Its so annoying right now.

It took me several attempts before posting my original topic and the 2nd one. Not sure how may attempts it's gonna take me to post this comment.

I would be interested to know about the current sever configuration. Is there any way to see it publicly?

It's alternating with cloudflare archive pages for me.

I guess the bounty spammers and the Twitbook posters with their bots are soaking up most of the server power. It's time they were moved onto a sidechain.

The 504 means¹ the server is down or not working properly. So, it could be something to do with admins recent update?


¹
ref

I'm also having the same error and I guess everyone's experiencing the error too. Maybe Admin is up to something?

It's always showing when something's happening. Get used to it 

From last 10 20 30 minutes or so, I am having problems when exploring the site. It's keep saying....


Seems like the website is having heavy load?