Upgrade your software!

[PsiPro]

So I get an e-mail from a client today complaining about server speed. Now most of the time its just perceived speed issues so I do a routine check and move on.

This time I found something, the server is one of my older servers, its a single socket quad core w/ 4GB of RAM. It an older set-up compared to my newer boxes but still a beast.

I typically run my (business) servers at 0.5 resting load ad 1.5 peak load... max. This server was cruising at 9 and peaking at 20, I immediately download the log tails and reboot the server (it was on 458 days of up time so I figured it was about time). When the server rebooted there were immediately http requests coming in.

So I checked out these URLs, there were three old phpbb forums that were getting hit repeatedly by spammers. After I disabled the directories and contacted the owners the servers load normalized to 0.3. The spammers were effectively DDoSing the server as I couldn't modify iptables to block them.

The moral of this story:
1) In shared hosting, the saying is "If you rock the boat you get thrown over". These clients rocked the boat and were warned that they need a captcha and that they need to keep their software updated. So moral #1, keep your commercial scripts updated! (If you can't, its cheap to hire people to do this)
2) If your website starts acting up and you don't think your getting what you paid for.... complain! This client's complaint made the server run much faster, and prevented me from losing other clients due to the speed decrease. He got his next three months of hosting comped. Moral #2 if your paying for quality demand quality.

[PsiPro]

Finally made a script to search for these old installs that are getting hit hard... disabled 7 more across 6 servers :/ On the plus side load has decreased significantly.