Strange Phenomena

men at workThere seems to be an intermittent problem or problems with the asymptotia site. I don’t know what it is. From time to time you’ll get a blank page served to you instead of the actual blog. I have not had time to diagnose the problem. I probably won’t get time to do so until tomorrow.

So if you get onto the site, then click onto another page within the site and get nothing…. hit reload, and/or maybe again in five minutes or so. If writing a comment and it does not take you back to the blog after you have hit “submit”… Use the “back” buttoon to go back to the page where you prepared the comment (your text should still be there) and try again later. Sorry about that.

If you happen to know what the issue might be, or spot a pattern that you think might be relevant to the problem, please let me know. You can email me at:

cvj [at] asymptotia.com

… and/or leave a comment.

It may be related to the two lines of code I added to the comments.php file to give numbers to each comment… I’m not sure why that could be creating the problem, but it is the only system change I’ve made recently.

-cvj

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25 Responses to Strange Phenomena

  1. Clifford says:

    Let me know by email if you suddenly cannot comment.

    -cvj

  2. Clifford says:

    New powerful weapon has been deployed against the several thousands spambot hits tying up the system. We shall see if this works.

    -cvj

  3. Plato says:

    In Arun’s post here
    he did not close off his bold “b” so it is making the rest of that thread highlighted in bold.

  4. Clifford says:

    Thanks…. same problem ? white screen of death?

    It persists. It does seem to correlate with surges of spam arriving al in a given minute. I coojecture that it just overloads things for a short while…. I don’t know if these waves will persist with their intensity and frequency.

    -cvj

  5. popocatepetl says:

    I came across another problem. Though the page itself was visible, the comments would not show up for a couple of posts when I checked last. Sometime around afternoon EST yesterday.

  6. Plato says:

    Clifford there are still some problems with what ever you adjusted. When clicking onto your main page everything was huge and your menu, on the bottom of your blog.

    When I click on “post title” the page adjusted itself back to normal

  7. Clifford says:

    Had more access problems with the “blank white screen of death”…. I think I correlated it to a wave of super-frequent spam attacks. Have now installed two additional powerful devices to shield the blog. I hope that there will be no more outages.

    -cvj

  8. popocatepetl says:

    I don’t remember exactly, but sometime in the early evening (EST) yesterday when I was reading my daily dose of blogs. I’ll note down the time and let you know if such washout happens ever again. Cheers.

  9. Clifford says:

    Hi! What was the last time yesterday that you checked it? Can you recall? I think I tried a fix about halfway through the day… but still am not sure what the problem’s source is. Anything you can tell me would be useful.

    Thanks,

    -cvj

  10. popocatepetl says:

    There is something strange going on indeed! The asymptotia homepage was blank for the whole of yesterday. I am using Mozilla firefox, if that information is of any use.

  11. Clifford says:

    Plato: – thanks.

    Amara: – Yes. It is a pain. I hope it is all worth it.

    -cvj

  12. Plato says:

    okay

  13. Plato says:

    test

  14. Amara says:

    Errors like the above are what I get when I post a comment that has a lot of links. I’m not sure that is related to your blank screen problem. I would tend more to your other idea of the attacks.

    Last summer I had a concerted attack on my web site where the attacker was looking for a way in, trying to run perl scripts that I had installed in the past and disabled years ago for authomatic mailing. The attacks were coming from domains scattered all over the Internet, using a peer-to-peer distribution, it seemed. My ISP (verizon) offered nothing to help. Since my only tool to defend myself was .htaccess, I ended up disabling access to large numbers of domains. It was overkill (and a large time sink on my side), but the attacks eventually stopped. I don’t know what advice to offer, Clifford. Only my sympathy. The Internet is really a pain sometimes.

  15. Clifford says:

    Plato: – let me know if the error message still appears when you try to comment. Simple yes/no would do, and a cut and paste of the result if it has changed to a new message. I cannot seem to see it, but I have made a change to the regexp.

    Thanks,

    -cvj

  16. Clifford says:

    Plato… that’s possibly very useful. Thanks.

    -cvj

  17. Plato says:

    When I try to post a comment to your site this is what came up. I think Jacque is very good at this kind of thing in terms of security?

    Regex ID: 3671 (optics123@yahoo.com) appears to be an invalid regex string! Please fix it in the Blacklist control panel.
    Regex ID: 3671 (optics123@yahoo.com) appears to be an invalid regex string! Please fix it in the Blacklist control panel.
    Regex ID: 3671 (optics123@yahoo.com) appears to be an invalid regex string! Please fix it in the Blacklist control panel.
    Regex ID: 3671 (optics123@yahoo.com) appears to be an invalid regex string! Please fix it in the Blacklist control panel.

    Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/asymptot/public_html/wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_util_class.php:208) in /home/asymptot/public_html/wp-comments-post.php on line 55

    Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/asymptot/public_html/wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_util_class.php:208) in /home/asymptot/public_html/wp-comments-post.php on line 56

    Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/asymptot/public_html/wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_util_class.php:208) in /home/asymptot/public_html/wp-comments-post.php on line 57

    Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/asymptot/public_html/wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_util_class.php:208) in /home/asymptot/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable-functions.php on line 288

  18. Plato says:

    Firefox has a security feature built into it when developing blogs I think. There is a upgrade here.

    Clifford it is important in terms of security, just as one takes a stand on environmentalism.

    I must tell you though that I was taken by surpirze when I seen this notice with google buying Youtube and other major developers buying others, such an action about Mircosoft didn’t seem unlikely.

    Well if you were principled and saw the process of computer developement you would think that the evil forces of capitalism had taken over the “GNU applications of choice” by microsoft applications?

    There is a certain thinking behind what developmental processes are doing facing each other, as we talk in the computer world. Netscape and Microsoft?

    Really a lot of us would lke to just be left alone to use the software, but if you discover “the freedom of the internet” should it be in such a strangle hold of what is allowed in China servers and what is not?

    So some of us believe you should have that freedom to develope(choice), while others do not.

    Hopefully, this is not thought as inappropriate

  19. Clifford says:

    Hmmmm I think the problem might be connected to the fact that my stats show that the site seems to be under attack by a factor of ten more spambots all of a sudden. About one every few seconds, at its peak. It is slowing everything down and generating errors. System reponds with blank page when it can’t render… I’m guessing.

    Please let me know if any of you get more blank screens.

    Thanks,

    -cvj

  20. Clifford says:

    Have temporarily disabled the comment counter. Will see if there are still problems.

    -cvj

  21. Say Lee says:

    Any idea what’s the latest version of IE now? Probably I should google to find the answer but I thought offhand you would know just by clicking the “help” in the IE browser window.

    I did the same to mine and it says Version 6.0.2900.2180 (SP 2). And the problem with this version is that I would lose the several description lines in the title block of my blog, but perfectly in Firefox v.1.5.0.8.

    So it would seem that the problem does lie with older versions of IE and the natural thing to do is to request the readers to either upgrade the IE or migrate to FireFox.

  22. spyder says:

    I haven’t experienced any disruption or blank pages; i use MacOS X with Netscape browser instead of Safarii.

  23. Amara says:

    I saw the blank page (running Firefox/1.5.0.8), but I haven’t seen a pattern yet.

  24. Clifford says:

    Thanks. That is not the issue. Latest versions of IE apparently work fine. The affliction for earlier versions of IE are known and I’ve not looked at solutions there, to be honest. This issue is to do with delivery of the entire site, from time to time. No pattern discerned as yet.

    -cvj

  25. FineStructure says:

    Clifford,
    I use the IE just as I dont have mozilla in my antiquated system and at times I dont see the page correctly(some letters in the left are not seen).

    I really like the background as the content dont look cluttered.
    Fine