ATTN: All Users, RE: Server Health & Status
Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 4:54 pm
Hello,
In the past few (2 or so) years, the Bartertown.com server has experienced some troubles. Last year, the site was slow, unresponsive and occasionally down. This year, many e-mail providers blacklisted us, stopping e-mail notifications from getting to your inbox. We've fought these issues as best we could, utilizing the help of the hosting site's tech support staff (who are amazing, BTW).
Yesterday, I found out we'd been added to four more blacklists, and today, I found out Yahoo has again blacklisted us. So, I contacted tech support to double check that we hadn't gotten infected, and that all e-mail traffic off our server was our own. After all, if we're going to approach companies like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft and ask to be taken off the blacklist because we're not a spammer, we need to be 100% sure. In the past, we'd come back clean. This time, I asked for a manual, in-depth search of the server - not just an anti-virus / anti-bot scan.
Lo, and behold, we found something.
I won't go into details, and I won't point fingers, but there was a personal site secretly being hosted on our server that was abandoned about two years ago, and I'm guessing that around that time, it's e-mail account was compromised. Since that time, it has been sending out spam e-mails, and when we found it today, there were about 150,000 e-mails in the queue.
I believe this was the cause of the poor server health we've been experiencing, and the reason so many e-mail providers have blacklisted us.
Our host has deleted and purged anything on the server not Bartertown.com related, and is clearing out that massive set of e-mails in the server's queue. They estimate that will take about an hour, and when they let me know that it's done, I'm going to perform a server restart, just to be sure no latent processes are running, and all the system resources get a chance to free up.
tl;dr: We found the equivalent of a forgotten tupperware dish full of rotten food in the back of the fridge that's been causing that funky smell we couldn't pin down. We're in the process of removing it and we expect a much faster and healthier site once that's done.
In the past few (2 or so) years, the Bartertown.com server has experienced some troubles. Last year, the site was slow, unresponsive and occasionally down. This year, many e-mail providers blacklisted us, stopping e-mail notifications from getting to your inbox. We've fought these issues as best we could, utilizing the help of the hosting site's tech support staff (who are amazing, BTW).
Yesterday, I found out we'd been added to four more blacklists, and today, I found out Yahoo has again blacklisted us. So, I contacted tech support to double check that we hadn't gotten infected, and that all e-mail traffic off our server was our own. After all, if we're going to approach companies like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft and ask to be taken off the blacklist because we're not a spammer, we need to be 100% sure. In the past, we'd come back clean. This time, I asked for a manual, in-depth search of the server - not just an anti-virus / anti-bot scan.
Lo, and behold, we found something.
I won't go into details, and I won't point fingers, but there was a personal site secretly being hosted on our server that was abandoned about two years ago, and I'm guessing that around that time, it's e-mail account was compromised. Since that time, it has been sending out spam e-mails, and when we found it today, there were about 150,000 e-mails in the queue.
I believe this was the cause of the poor server health we've been experiencing, and the reason so many e-mail providers have blacklisted us.
Our host has deleted and purged anything on the server not Bartertown.com related, and is clearing out that massive set of e-mails in the server's queue. They estimate that will take about an hour, and when they let me know that it's done, I'm going to perform a server restart, just to be sure no latent processes are running, and all the system resources get a chance to free up.
tl;dr: We found the equivalent of a forgotten tupperware dish full of rotten food in the back of the fridge that's been causing that funky smell we couldn't pin down. We're in the process of removing it and we expect a much faster and healthier site once that's done.
Thanks Plarz.