What happened to GEOFEX.COM ?

[Krinor]

All I get is an error message: "Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)"

Anyone ?

[Papa_lazerous]

I just tried it, seems like its down right now

[Krinor]

And I was finally getting down to do some serious reading! 
Oh well... There's lots of stuff around here to check out. 

[Hobie]

 i just etched a pcb for the tremface and was going to solder it all together tonight... now i can't view the component side of the pcb. big bummer ... hope it's back soon.

[R.G.]

Yeah, me too!

I just went to consult my former self on some things and found the "invalid hostname" thing.

I think it's an issue with the name servers. I've already pinged my hosting service - all good there; network solutions - shows fine there. I was actually about to post a request for someone to try geofex from outside my local access domain to see if it could be just my local nameserver.

I'll go pester some other people about it.

[Paul Marossy]

You didn't let your domain name expire, did you RG? 

[R.G.]

You didn't let your domain name expire, did you RG?

Actually, that was my first suspicion.     but nope - it's good for another decade or two. Neither did the hosting plan expire.

It's back up now. It turns out that my hosting service suspended access to GEO. It seems that the geofex domain was eating up all resources on the shared server pool which hosts it, and was out-competing about fifteen other sites on the pool. They naturally assumed that I had been playing amateur webmeister and written code that ate up resources and never released them - which of course is not the case.

There is that non-public area on GEO. Remember that? Turns out that some budding effects wizard was determined to break into that, and had a bot spinning on it trying to break the password by a dictionary attack. The bot was sending requests faster than the host could send back denials and that ultimately led the host to wind up and die. So we just deleted the nonpublic area, no problem

I guess someone didn't believe me the times I've posted that there's usually nothing in there, that's it's only short term sent/receive bucket for stuff that's not to be public.

Ran into some interesting stuff though. The hosting service thought I was running a huge business from GEO, based on the traffic. I get many, many times the normal traffic they'd expect for the size of stuff hosted there, and something like 10X the unique visitors. They had a hard time believing I don't run advertising out of GEO, and don't sell or advertise GEO other than by the number of places linked to it. I told them I didn't know that because until they upped the storage allowances, I was overrunning all my alloted storage with the traffic logs so I turned traffic logging off. 

Anyway, I think it's running OK now. Back to your regularly scheduled discussions.

Too late I figured out that the better thing to do would have been to put "I TOLD you there was nothing in here!" on the nonpublic page and remove the password protection.

There's really, really nothing hidden inside GEOFEX now. Not even a password protected empty page. 

[GonzoFonts]

I just went to consult my former self on some things....

Sounds like RG has been sniffing too much of the solder fumes. 

I guess someone didn't believe me the times I've posted that there's usually nothing in there...

What you should have done is put nonsense into the directory. Files named "new_secret_overdrive_design.pdf", etc and just have schematics that go in circles.

GF

[R.G.]

What you should have done is put nonsense into the directory. Files named "new_secret_overdrive_design.pdf", etc and just have schematics that go in circles.

Yeh. Better yet, generate several megabytes of pure random bits and name the file the same thing. The funny thing about that is that a hacker would be sure that I had just encrypted it with a crypt program better than they could break and would hack on it forever.

Something similar has happened historically. Go look up the Beale Ciphers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beale_Ciphers

[wampcat1]

Too late I figured out that the better thing to do would have been to put "I TOLD you there was nothing in here!" on the nonpublic page and remove the password protection.

There's really, really nothing hidden inside GEOFEX now. Not even a password protected empty page. 

That would've been funny! 
Actually, if it was me, I'd have a huge picture of me posing in my skivvies or something disgusting like that (  ) with the subtitle " ARE YOU HAPPY NOW!!?? "
heheh..
bw

[frankclarke]

Works now. I always thought it would be fun to have som random garbage in my email to keep The Central Scruitinizer busy. How it working?

[Paul Marossy]

It turns out that my hosting service suspended access to GEO. It seems that the geofex domain was eating up all resources on the shared server pool which hosts it, and was out-competing about fifteen other sites on the pool. They naturally assumed that I had been playing amateur webmeister and written code that ate up resources and never released them - which of course is not the case.

Huh, that makes sense. Even my lame little website is averaging about 33-34 Gigs of bandwidth each month. I have 50 Gigs per month available, so I theoritically shouldn't have a problem like that. 

[caress]

hmmm... geo still not working for me - getting "Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)"

[Papa_lazerous]

Yeah its back down now

Another hack attempt??

[R.G.]

Don't know. I'm on the phone with the hosting service right now. It was working fine earlier today.

Maybe I ...really... offended someone.   

[Papa_lazerous]

Hard to imagine that, you are always mroe than helpful with indepth explanations.  More than likely some 15 year old snotty nosed kid running a load of scripts he didnt even write himself

[R.G.]

And now it's back up. I'll see if I can get the hosting service to 'splain dis to me.

[Mark Hammer]

I can confirm the resumption of access to the site.

LUCY!!!!!

[R.G.]

... 'ju got some 'splainin' to do...