Positive Fusion

There appears to have been a configuration change on the webhost for positivefusion.info. This change is preventing connection to port 25 (SMTP) on the main hosting webserver. Due to the inability to connect to port 25 the service is being viewed as offline even though the service is indeed online.

There is was a brief and intense load spike that disrupted services. This situation has been taken care of and service is returning to normal.

While the network provider has not expected any extended outages, it is quite possible that those connecting through AboveNet have been unable to connect to the server. From our location direct connectivity has been mostly non-existant past approximately 5AM. The webserver itself is fine and processing requests, and only this particular routing is experiencing issues. We have filed a “Network Issues” report with the data center and hope for this connectivity problem to be remedied as soon as possible.

The data center has informed us that one of the upstream providers (AboveNet) is performing network maintenance this morning (28 January) and tomorrow morning (29 January). The general timeframe for this maintenance is 1AM to 7AM.

They will be rerouting traffic; however, as always some latency may occur when the routing reconverges. No extended outages are expected during this maintenance.

If you are unable to connect to the server during the maintenance window this is most likely the cause and will clear soon.

We have been using an Apache module known as mod_security to help prevent various types of intrusions on the webserver for quite a long time.

One thing that users may not know is that mod_security is very adept at stopping comment spam to content management systems also.

You may implement this mod_security filtering to protect against comment spam by entering a few short lines into your .htaccess file.


## Enable Mod Security ##
SecFilterEngine On
SecFilterScanPOST On
SecFilterDefaultAction “deny,log,status:412″

## Comment Spam Indicators ##
SecFilterSelective “POST_PAYLOAD” “poker-w\.com”
SecFilterSelective “POST_PAYLOAD” “texas-holdem-big\.com”
SecFilterSelective “POST_PAYLOAD” “onlinepoker-i\.com”


The three filter lines above are already implemented server wide (as of this update), you do not need to include those within your .htaccess file. All spaces and periods must be escaped with a backslash as in the above example. This example sends a “412: Precondition Failed” error message, as is appropriate; however, you may change it to something like a “403: Forbidden” error by changing the error code number.

You can also redirect rejected POSTs by using the following example, which in this case redirects to the federal cybercrimes reporting site:

SecFilterSelective “POST_PAYLOAD” “poker-w\.com” “redirect:http://www.cybercrime.gov/reporting.htm”

Regardless of how it appears in your browser the redirection example should appear on ONE line, not split across two lines.