Positive Fusion

The system has recovered from a denial of service attack launched from 66.230.167.216. The IP address has now been banned from accessing the server.

This DoS was, as usual, in the form of a spam attack targeting content management systems, in this case Wordpress trackbacking.

This morning there was an issue with Spam Assassin, which has caused a number of emails to be queued for delivery instead of the normal instant-ish delivery. The issue has been corrected and you should begin receiving any delayed email as the sending servers reprocess their queues.

This same issue created a situation of consistently heavier load than normal. The nightly backup process was prevented from running and there was also periods of where websites may have given time-out or server not found messages.

Spam Assassin and Cpanel have both been updated to help prevent this issue from re-appearing.

It seems the original cause of the issue was an auto-update to Spam Assasin where there was a corrupted module downloaded from CPAN. The system kept thrashing until the corrupted Perl modules were reinstalled manually.

The server has just recovered from a multiple IP attack on the IP ranges of 81.177.15.0/24 & 81.177.14.0/24. The Denial of Service attack on Apache/MySQL caused the services to temporarily fail, the IP ranges have now been banned from accessing the server.

We have updated our installation of Squirrel Mail at http://mobile.positivefusion.com ( https://secure.positivefusion.com/mobile/) to fix a few bugs and other little annoyances. The migration went smoothly, but if you are a Mobile Email user and notice difficulties please let us know through standard support methods and we’ll see what we can do.

You may need to go into Options/Display Preferences to reselect the ‘Positive Fusion’ theme. It is the default, but if you prefer the standard Squirrel Mail theme you can still use that one. :)

Our Mobile Email is a great alternative to using Cpanel’s built-in Squirrel Mail, particularly if you’re behind a firewall that doesn’t allow traffic over Cpanel’s ports.

SSH access has been restored, I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.