Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Can't disable it even to upgrade, this is CRAZY!

To easily performs some upgrades I took my bot blocker offline for a couple of hours. This way I could update the tracking database and software without worrying about accidentally killing the site. Then I completed installing the latest changes and turned the bot blocker back on and the site was running slower than shit.

My first reaction was panic that I'd busted something big time but my local version was faster than hell, so I looked into the current server accesses .... holy crap!

Guess what, while the bot blocker was offline for less than 2 hours, some asshole came and overloaded the fucking server when I wasn't watching. The running task list was enormous, the number of concurrent page requests was HUGE!

I punted the asshole's current tasks off the server and the bot blocker took over from there and restored calm to the website.

Seriously though, it's pretty scary when I can't even disable the bot blocked for a brief time without all hell breaking loose. Kind of reminds me of someone I knew that got hacked in less than 5 minutes while trying to replace a firewall with the machine still stupidly connected to the net.

Guess next time I'll either have to work faster or come up with an update plan that has no down time.

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