Positive Fusion

There have been three load related outages this evening, none last for more than approximately eight minutes (at least according to monitoring services). This was again the result of a user’s script consuming far too many resources as a result of comment spam abuse.

The user had been warned and advised to take action to correct this problem; however it is continuing and thus we’ve taken action and disabled the script to protect the overall integrity of the server environment.

To be absolutely clear, Movable Type versions prior to 3.x are prohibited from being used with Positive Fusion. There are severe problems with those earlier versions, they are unable to handle comment spamming in an efficient manner. If attention is drawn to your website by it having a negative effect on the server, especially in this case to the extent that it causes the server to be unavailable to all other users, we will disable the script causing the problem.

There has been a “run away” cgi script that temporarily took down some services due to server overload. This issue has been resolved, but it will take some time for the server load to return to normal.

We are unable to reach the webserver; however service monitoring within the data centre and located on different internet/network segments indicate all services are online and available.

We believe this to be a network/routing issue, it may be specific to our network segment or it may be effecting other users, we are currently checking into all possibilities.

Currently all packets are being lost / dropped over XO’s routing in Texas.

Update @ 17:35 EDT Routing issues appear to have been resolved.