Anyone out there? :-)

I noticed that there weren't any recent availability announcements in the Service Provider forum, so I thought I'd check out EC...and it seems to be down!

I'm hoping this is only temporary... ;-)

We are aware that the site is down. The problem is being worked on and will be back online as soon as possible. We do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused but our support team is on the job and will get it back online as they can.

Not Mod.. this one is beyond me... the senior techs are on the case and they appear to be a little stumped. Still working on it... should make for a very unpleasant weekend for all of us if they can't fix it soon.

It's alive! -- Finally!

You know with all the technology we have these days you would think that a simple website could stay online. Especially when we go to such great lengths to make sure everything is backed up and redundant.

We have redundant EVERYTHING with the escorts-canada site... we have redundant internet connections (In case one provider goes down the other takes over), battery backups good for 12 hours, diesel generator backup power good for 2 weeks (until the tanks need to be refilled) and we even have mirrored servers (if one is too busy or goes offline the other takes up the slack) ... but with all this redundancy the site still manages to go offline because some idiot kid (We call the script kiddies - usually kids learning how to hack servers) finds a new way (or reinvents a old way with a new twist) to crash a web server and bring down a site (and they like to target adult sites and high traffic sites of course). This idiot managed to bring everything down and lock us out of the servers.... it does not appear that he/she gained access to anything so no worries at this time about that.

The big problem is we don't know exactly how it was done. All we have so far is his IP and a error log that says "reverse mapping checking getaddrinfo failed - POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!" (Nice eh!? - but we also have his/her IP address so that should help with the logs)

Well at least we know what happened we just don't know how it happened yet so we will be spending the rest of our weekend sifting thru log files and trying to find out how this was accomplished so that it does not happen again... So if you notice it offline again over the weekend it's probably just us trying to patch the vulnerability so it does not happen again.

It was offline for 10 hours today because of this... and that is HUGE for us! I am actually embarrased that this has happened.

On the topic of redundancy... We even have redundant internet connections at the office too (Bell DSL and Rogers cable) as both are unreliable... and sometimes they both go offline at the same time (Like today for about 5 minutes they were both out while we were tyring to fix this) - Murphy's Law!!! LOL...

Anyway.. I am venting after a stressful day and prolonging my date with the server logs (trying to find out how this was done).

Wow mod, that is a lot of backups. Who would have thought that there would be this much resilience in the design of this type of service. Kudo's to the team for the recovery.