Site Timing Out

I have noticed that this site keeps “timing out” and won’t even come up. What’s happening with that?

The server ran out of kerosene…

Actually, it uses coal. Clean coal, though.

God’s vengeance, couldn’t be clearer. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

The internet works in mysterious ways.

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I shall repeat myself as many times as unnecessary.

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I get it too! As far as I could tell, the site was inaccessible since at least 26th August and that only changed this morning.

Moreover, there’s no way to contact anyone for help.

Maybe it’s a Cloudflare thing? I kept getting Cloudflare Error 522 which apparently means Cloudflare can’t contact the originating server.

UK Atheist

Sadly we don’t know the cause. There is no full time support for the site so we seem to be dependant on the good wishes of a couple of ex staff who look after these outages.

Don’t discount the ill will of some external players who have taken umbrage with the founders political position.

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You’re suggesting some kind of DOS or DDOS attack?

UK Atheist

Yeah…funny how protecting a divine power relies on silencing human doubt…but I digress.

I believe this forum runs on Discourse. While a step above some of the other Jurassic forum platforms, it is not immune from DDOS attacks. While it runs through Cloudflare, which can be robust, if you don’t have the coin to engineer a reverse proxy you are still vulnerable.

Seeing as how we run no ads, which wouldn’t pay for a Cat 6 cable anyway, and rely heavily on donations, the handwriting is on the wall.

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Isn’t it more likely that it runs on a VM at some VM hosting service?

Edit: the forum resolves to these two IP addresses:

$ host forum.atheistrepublic.com
forum.atheistrepublic.com has address 172.67.164.153
forum.atheistrepublic.com has address 104.21.82.227

Unless hidden behind a VPN or some other network trickery, the physical location seems to be in or near San Francisco (map location not precise, only given as being “near the center of population”), thus suggesting it is in a rack in some data center;

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