Firewall Rules slowly restoring system and a recap

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solarchat
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Firewall Rules slowly restoring system and a recap

Post by solarchat »

Users,

On Saturday we had an incident and as a result the firewalls on all the NATCA servers were reset to maximum protection. This excluded ANYONE from making any changes to any files on any server.
Since the forum is run by adding and editing fields in a SQL table, no ones posts were accepted because no changes could be made to the table. The log in feature still worked fine but no one could post anything, including me. I also could not change anything in the administrative side of the forum as this also required writing to the servers hard drive. It was extremely frustrating for me as myh server admin log in credentials were also invalidated.

I was not aware of the problem until after I got back from a local park where I was doing an outreach event. I had to get the guy in New York who physically oversees our NATCA servers to go into the firewall and see what was up. He fixed the problem within about 15 minutes which allowed US IP addresses to post. Unfortunately, since a lot of our users are not in the US and since almost every country has a different protocol and IP address for accessing forums, etc... it took us almost 3 days to fix the various posting issues from other countries. Every time someone sent me an email about a firewall alert, we went back in and wrote a new rule to address this issue. Then we had to tackle the blocking of different file types from all the different countries, etc... Suffice it to say that I have been pulling my hair out trying to get the forum back up and running.

I am humiliated that it has taken so long to fix this but I am at the mercy of another entity with the server maintenance. I really appreciate everyone's patience and I hope that we dont lose any members over this problem. And, I made a few off color jokes about the situation which were taken the wrong way and I apologize to the members affected.

Anyway, thank you for remaining valued users of the forum and I am, as always, in search of a more easily accessible host and a person who can figure out how to upgrade us to better forum software while retaining all the messages and users in this one. I WILL keep this thing going and I think we have and continue to make a valuable contribution to the hobby and to science outreach in general.

If you have any further issues with the firewall, please try and copy what you tried to post and the filenames of attachments and send as much info as you can to sramsden at solarastronomy dot org


Stephen W. Ramsden
Atlanta, GA USA
Founder/Director Charlie Bates Solar Astronomy Project
http://www.solarastronomy.org
RobBower

Re: Firewall Rules slowly restoring system and a recap

Post by RobBower »

Stephen Im pretty sure everyone here has nothing but thanks and praise to throw your way! You spend much of your time enabling us to reach out and get together, meeting and sharing with our friends around the world! If nothing else, we owe you our deepest thanks for giving each of us a tool to enjoy our Hobby, and share it with the many friends we have made on here because of you!

No apologize nor bad feelings required... :rockon: :bow:


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swisswalter
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Re: Firewall Rules slowly restoring system and a recap

Post by swisswalter »

Hi Stephen

thank you for your good Job. I second totally what John has written


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Re: Firewall Rules slowly restoring system and a recap

Post by marktownley »

Good job Stephen. Thanks for your tireless efforts! :)


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Re: Firewall Rules slowly restoring system and a recap

Post by Montana »

:bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon:

3 cheers for Stephen!
:hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster:

Alexandra


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nqastronomy
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Re: Firewall Rules slowly restoring system and a recap

Post by nqastronomy »

G'day Stephen.

I agree 100% with everything already said.

:rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :rockon: :hamster: :hamster: :hamster: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:


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