Don't let it keep you down

Ourmedia went blank the other day for a few moments. Apache was up. MySQL was up. There had been no recent changes to code.

The user 0 record was missing again. It is a mystery as to what causes this. I had just dropped a database, but that should not have had any effect.

Luckily it was a quick restore of a record to the users table. This is the third time that this has happened. First for me. Luckily the SQL INSERT statement was still in the command buffer.

A week ago, during the SpinXpress Hackathon, we experienced a flood of requests. A DOS attack or a runnaway aggregator perhaps? We blocked the IP and others could connect again. Could see this with a "ps -ef | grep httpd". Lately, this number has been in the 40-50 range. That night, the number soared. Stop and starting the server showed that the connections were being re-established quickly. We called our hosting admin and they blocked the IP (from China).