Could the recent security issues with EB have thrown Server Errors
By Paul Murray on Wednesday, 21 May 2014
Posted in Technical Issues
Replies 23
Likes 0
Views 580
Votes 0
Hello Support

I know this is silly but I did not note the exact error. My guess is that it was pretty standard stuff. It just told me something went wrong and asked me to contact my Administrator!

*********************************************************

Hello Support

More errors being thrown at 8:10 am

whilst trying to navigate here:

http://finalbug.net/blog

Please also see:

Auftrag VS Linux 178.77.72.249 (214004) #HE-DE:37c92659df4978942#

This is happening more and more often. Please advise.

thanks

Paul


Dear Mr. Murray,

the root cause for the reported problem is a high load on your server caused by PHP processes running under the user ftpfinalbugnet.

For us it seems like the PHP processes are causing the high system load.

Unfortunately we don't know the web application you are running on the server therefore you have to investigate the root cause for the high cpu load for your PHP scripts on your own.

Please don't hesitate to contact us again if there are any questions left.

Kind Regards
Fabian Wolf

******************************

I have since updated to the latest version of EB.
Just want to double check if this was the likely cause of the problem!?!

thanks

Paul
Hello Paul,

To be honest, the message is pretty vague and it doesn't actually tell us anything at all. If they could provide us with some logs like slow logs or something, we could identify the issue.
Mark
·
Thursday, 22 May 2014 00:19
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hi Mark

My stubborn host is being stubborn so I am going to let this one slide.

thanks all the same

best

Paul
Paul Murray
·
Friday, 23 May 2014 12:36
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
No problem Paul Consider moving away from your host.
Mark
·
Friday, 23 May 2014 12:46
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hello Support

Sorry to drag this up again but my hoster did get back to me with a very cryptic answer!

Does this make any sense:

**********************************************************

Dear Paul,


> Is this ongoing or at some point in the past?
> Where are you seeing this if not in a log?

unfortunately you are still genrating highload. This you can see by the tool "top".
Here ist the output of the actual system state:
top - 14:32:27 up 96 days, 16:09, 0 users, load average: 4.52, 4.47, 3.61
Tasks: 71 total, 3 running, 67 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 36.0%us, 18.0%sy, 45.3%ni, 0.0%id, 0.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2097152k total, 844600k used, 1252552k free, 0k buffers
Swap: 2097152k total, 4k used, 2097148k free, 0k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
14003 ftpfinal 18 0 189m 35m 8312 R 50.0 1.8 0:04.93 php5-cgi
13766 root 26 10 9340 1284 508 S 42.6 0.1 1:20.72 pigz

Kind regards
Andreas

**********************************************************

I only have a couple of 100 visitors a days. So I do not get what is going on here!?!

Or am I being paranoid

thanks
Paul
Paul Murray
·
Friday, 23 May 2014 21:51
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Paul, can you check and see if Trackbacks is enabled in EasyBlog? If so, check trackbacks and see if there are tons of spams there?
Mark
·
Friday, 23 May 2014 23:41
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hi Mark

I have read the article:

http://stackideas.com/blog/what-is-a-blog-trackback

Great article by the way. Tracksback is enabled on my Site.

Also this:

http://stackideas.com/forums/extreme-usage-of-cpu

But still draw a blank as to where I should check Trackbacks?

Please advise

thanks

Paul
Paul Murray
·
Saturday, 24 May 2014 05:37
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hello Paul,

You can find the trackback options at the back end of EasyBlog under the "Trackbacks" button. You should see a list of trackbacks to the site if there are any trackbacks at all.
Mark
·
Saturday, 24 May 2014 14:05
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hi Mark it looks OK to me. Please screen shot. Is there anything else that could be causing this? best Paul.
Paul Murray
·
Saturday, 24 May 2014 17:11
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
hey guys,
looks like here's a mis-communication going on

@paul:
when mark said you should check trackbacks he meant to click on this button: http://screencast.com/t/EtqKL9GHDRFc (not the settings in general, as you already said that they are enabled).

now checking this you have a huge amount of entries in there, about 600.000 - so what you should do now is: turn trackbacks OFF in the settings and then monitor your site over the next weeks and chances are high that the server load will go down significantly so that your problem with the host will be solved.

hope that helps and have a nice day
Alex
·
Saturday, 24 May 2014 17:22
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hi Alex

Ok got it thanks. Wow yeah 600.000 is a lot by any stretch of the imagination. Can you recommend a tool that I can use for monitoring purposes. I reckon I should monitor for a couple of days with Trackbacks still on and then switch off Trackbacks and continuing monitoring. This way I can get a better idea of what this 600.000 track backs are doing to my site.

best

Paul
Paul Murray
·
Saturday, 24 May 2014 17:41
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hello Paul,

Turn off trackbacks because we are going to remove it in EasyBlog 4.0 anyway. Trackbacks was meant to build link backs for blogs that was created in the past but lately, it seems like these spammers are really hitting really hard on trackbacks. Turn it off, and run the SQL query below to remove all trackbacks (So that MySQL wouldn't be heavy)



truncate table #__easyblog_trackback


Replace #__ with your table prefix.
Mark
·
Saturday, 24 May 2014 23:40
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hi Mark

I entered turned off trackback and entered the code you pasted in the box on the right hand side.

Nothing really happened as such. No error. No green light. Is there a way of knowing if this worked?

best

Paul
Paul Murray
·
Sunday, 25 May 2014 00:24
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hello Paul,

You need to click on the "SQL" tab
Mark
·
Sunday, 25 May 2014 13:37
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hi Mark

I enter this:

truncate table #__easyblog_trackback
Replace__#fBUG2013

and get please see screen shot

best

Paul
Paul Murray
·
Sunday, 25 May 2014 15:31
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hello Paul,

What is your table prefix for your database?
Mark
·
Monday, 26 May 2014 03:24
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
hi Mark

to the best of my knowledge: _#fBUG2013

thanks

Paul
Paul Murray
·
Monday, 26 May 2014 03:32
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hello Paul,

I don't think that is your database prefix. Why don't you proivde us with your phpmyadmin access and I'll help you to run it.
Mark
·
Monday, 26 May 2014 11:00
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hello Support

I think this one slipped through your support system. Could someone help me on this one please.

My guess is that it is really silly that I have a line too many or a space or something.

thanks

Paul
Paul Murray
·
Tuesday, 27 May 2014 13:35
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hello Paul,

Sorry for late reply to this,
I have help you truncate table fbug_easyblog_trackback from your database, please have a check.
Arlex Wong
·
Tuesday, 27 May 2014 17:46
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hello Arlex

Thank you very much for clearing this up for me. Lets hope this helps speed up my site

thanks

Paul
Paul Murray
·
Wednesday, 28 May 2014 15:00
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
You are most welcome Paul It will definitely reduce the load because whenever anyone accesses these blog posts that were being spammed by trackbacks, EasyBlog tries to load these "trackbacks". Now, imagine what happens if that blog post that is being accessed has 5000 spams
Mark
·
Thursday, 29 May 2014 00:50
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hi Mark

>>> Now, imagine what happens if that blog post that is being accessed has 5000 spams

No I would rather not

One more thing. I have been having problems backing up with Akeeba back up recently. Typically throwing server errors and taking 2/3 attempts to get it to work. I am doing a backup now and every thing is already going noticeably faster/smoother. It would be a reasonable guess that these issues were related yes?

best

Paul
Paul Murray
·
Friday, 30 May 2014 14:09
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
Hello Paul,

Perhaps I believe so because it's also backing up those spams as well.
Mark
·
Saturday, 31 May 2014 00:52
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
View Full Post