I don’t know if it’s the virus but it can’t be traffic. I’m in Boston. It’s 4:45 central time. 20 people logged on. Four out of five times I try to connect it times out. When it does connect it up to a minute to load. An hour ago I entirely lost a post I sent because it wouldn’t connect. I’m not very hopeful this will go through but maybe I’ll get lucky.
I ran a few trace routes and the problem seems to be with the chicago reader network. Usually boards.straightdope.com is right after chicagoreader-gw.customer.alter.net. On a few of my traces 3 to 17 extra hops appeared between them. My traceroute program (Ping Plotter) didn’t show any IP addresses for the extra hops, and indicated they all had errors. Got a few "destination address unreachable"s as well.
Please. Don’t piss in my ear and tell me it’s a virus.
I could not access ANY part of SDMB for HOURS earlier. I have had problems with my ISP lately, so I opened browsers to several other websites at the same time that I tried to get into the SDMB.
Every site responded with alacrity but THIS one.
19 users? I saw that too, but I saw 20. There was a problem here, but they’re gonna deny it. They got the Cecil Sickness. Inability to admit error.
Tuba, don’t insult these people by hiding behind a virus that is not affecting their machines… if you’re infected, just admit it and move on. Please don’t blame it on “outside servers.”
I don’t think it’s the Code Red.
For most of this week, the boards are flying. I have Roadrunner cable, so things usually go well. I usually access the boards between 6:00PM-until midnight or later.
This morning, with 10 members on the board, I had the worst time accessing it ever. And I tried accessing 5 other sites which I visit–no problems. Instant load. Came back to the SDMB and s-l-o-w.
Is Jerry doing work at night until about 7:00 AM Chicago time? 'Cause now there are 53 members and 19 guests, and the boards are flying for me once again.
What Sam said.
Surreal.
East coast of the US here. Internet central in Northern Virginia.
And no worries, I’ve been flying all week.
Far as I’m concerned, keep up the good work.
Jonathan, were you on in the last six hours?
The boards being unreachable for me for the last few hours(not that thats a huge prob. as I could get some work done)
It seems to be flying now.
I get great pleasure from reading the entire board and I must say, even with the slow downs it’s well worth every penny I’ve spent on it 
Keep up the good work folks.
FarmerOak, rule number one on the board: Don’t be a jerk.
I’m sure that the SDMB and Chicago Reader staff are doing what they can. Tracking down network congestion issues is never easy, particularly when they are intermittent. Organizations that have staff dedicated to network maintenance can’t always figure out these problems quickly.
My experience accessing the Board is that it has been much faster overall than it was before, but there are still times when it gets bogged down. Most of the time, though, I have no problem getting in.
Jerk is my metier, old bean. Check this thread, where they’re still trying to determine whether I’m an asshole. I guess I can count on your vote.
That having been said, this is one jerk who found the board to be going great guns for a couple days… and then perflank! In the time frame I was discussing, the board could not have been performing worse. After the maintenance, all was well… and then, THIS.
FarmerOak - I am tired of your shop-worn “look at me, I’m so smart I’ll insult the Moderators and Administrators every chance I get” attitude. You patronise and insult Tuba here, yet make many basic errors yourself.
For someone who claimed in the Pit recently that he was so incredibly smart, you apparently do not seem to understand how the Internet works. All it takes is one bad host between you and the SDMB to kill your access. Hence your question to Jonathan makes no sense unless you are in the same geographical location & your ISP chooses to route your traffic along the exact same route.
For your information, the CodeRed Worm, only affects Microsoft Index Server 2.0 and the Windows 2000 Indexing service on computers running Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 that run (ie have installed) IIS 4.0 and 5.0 Web servers. For further details, you and others, can visit http://www.sarc.com, a very useful source of free clean up information, virus/worm/hoax alerts and updates.
The fact that it is not likely to be attacking the machines of most of the users of the SDMB bears no relationship to its ability to affect their use of the SDMB server. It will be affecting the servers and routers handling the traffic between them and it. I have had problems accessing at certain times this week when it used to fly along, occasional patchy behaviour later in the day, and assumed it was some last minute tweaking and maintenance being done at American low visit times, but London_Calling who is based in the same time zone and presumably accesses it at the same times has not. This makes it much more likely that it is the fault of the worm than anything happening on the SDMB server as that would affect all users equally.
For your information, the SDMB (& the UnaBoard too, for that matter) uses ApacheServer as their web server and therefore are not and could not have been affected by the worm attack.
Servers between them and you could be. This effect should be getting less as the worm peaked its attack on July 28th and is in sleep mode now. Patches are available from Microsoft & Network Supports & Systems Administrators are taking down servers, patching them and bringing them back online, another item that will slow traffic unpredictably, but which needs doing in case the virus leaves sleep mode, and to stop other coders exploiting the same loophole.
This is a temporary problem affecting your service with the SDMB. Getting repeatedly pissed at the mods & admins of the board that work so hard to provide us with the service and calling them liars who hide behind viruses isn’t going to give you a temporary problem in your account - at least, it is exceptionally rude and ignorant, at worst (from your viewpoint), it is likely to get you banned.
I’ve been getting behavior from the board that isn’t so much irritating as mystifying. I’ll try to open a thread and get a timeout. Ten seconds after the timeout, I’ll try to open the same thread and the thing loads in the blink of an eye. Next thread, timeout, timeout, molasses load. Next thread, superfast load. And so on, all within the space of 10 minutes. In my fairly limited experience, this is atypical for this board - usually, it’s more consistent.
(Notes: I am on mostly during the US night, and I typically do not experience long wait times - and almost never get timeouts, no matter when I visit. And I wasn’t getting this kind of behavior from any other site.)
I assumed that this weirdness was because either a) someone was running a monster search routine or b) some kinda testing was going on because of the maintenance. It can’t be b, because presumably the admins and mods would know. So my question: could a search routine or script make the board act like this?
(Note: in general, apart from the recent strangeness, the board seems faster since Jerry did whatever it was he did.)
I’ll bring this to the attention of the techs. (Though no promises as to what they discover, if anything.)
The board shouldn’t be bogged down in the wee hours of the day, this is unexpected.
Farmer Oak, you can have issues with what happens around here – stuff happens, though we do our best to keep it from negatively affecting the board and your experience here – but you don’t have to abuse us while you do it. Criticism is acceptable and often expected, even, but you can be civil about it while you do it.
your humble TubaDiva
Adminstrator
fierra:
How shall I respond? Point-by-Point?
- I do not insult the moderators every chance I get. I have here a list of 7 opportunities with which I was provided to insult moderators, and I declined. I further have a list of 312 opportunities to insult members, which I further declined. Some of the insults were vulgar, some were racist, several were homophobic, and at least one made no sense, even to me. Nonetheless, I held back. I choose the insults. Else, how can I be the Farmer?
I state my intelligence proudly because it’s who I am, it’s all I’ve got. You might be taller, you might be heavier, you might be wealthier, you might be better than me in any measurable regard, but the chances of you being smarter than me are miniscule in the extreme.
That is not to say that you are are not BETTER than me, or more SUCCESSFUL than me… many are, who do not approach my intellect.
And I am NOT the smartest person on earth… far from it… but my intellect is formidable. My KNOWLEDGE is formidable.
And I never questioned YOUR knowledge or intellect…
That having been said…
The problems with the board over the last few hours were NOT attributable to the Red Worm…
I can beat you to death with topics about which you are ignorant…
And I am much more familiar with what gets one banned than are you.
— Good on you. You are hip to how your appliance works. I GUARANTEE that you will not stand for your auto mechanic dictating your behavior to you.
And you are a computer guy. I’ll not live my life by computer guy terms.
Name one time I was abusive or apologize.
NAME ONE.
I want this board to run well, too, but NAME ONE TIME I WAS ABUSIVE ABOUT IT.
Most nights the board is performing a backup to a LAN tape drive between 03:30 to about 06:00. Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, sometimes the automated process fubars and we have to run it in the middle of the day. It’s a big backup and it negatively effects performance.
Bull. This board goes down daily at 3:30am CDT, for about fifteen minutes, and that’s it.
But not like this… Daytime PDT, everything has been flying since the upgrade.
Last night between midnight and 3 (I guess that’s 2 and 5 CDT), couldn’t get through for anything.
Yup. The board was down from for a good two hours. From 1:00CDT to 3:00CDT, no explanation.
Thank you for providing that information so rapidly, jdavis. I still don’t understand why it has never affected load times for us before though (or is it a new thing you’ve been doing since the weekend?).
FarmerOak - this is atmb, I had no intention of starting a major hijack of this thread when I called you on your lack of manners. If you want to make more out of it than my reply to you here, pit me, and I’ll happily respond. If not, then note that accusing someone of “piss[ing] in [your] ear and tell[ing] [you] it’s a virus” is damn rude. It is above the levels of abuse that anyone should have to suffer in the performance of their duties.
I’d also like to point out to you that I’m female, not a guy, but I had equal access to virus alert information when I was as admin assistant and knew a damn sight more about how computers worked than many of the techies. Not being a “computer guy” when there is a deluge of antivirus information around these days is no excuse for not knowing at least some facts about how they work or how the net works.
I don’t see how auto mechanics have any relationship to anything, but if I were as rude to them as you have been to Tuba and to many others on this board, I would expect them to tell me to go away & refuse to serve me next time.
I see whilst I have been typing this reply to you, you have been rude to jdavis too and called him a liar. Obviously, you know more about how the board is run than its chief tech guy. Is getting banned and acting like a jerk really your goal? Can anyone possibly defend you being rude to Tuba and jdavis like you have been here?