29 March : 9am
Just an update sorry we did not update this yesterday. We located a shell script running on the php52 server that we disabled so we have been able to turn this server on again and all websites are running again.
The small number of clients who are on this server need to really consider redeveloping their websites - running your website in Joomla 1.0 that requires an end of life PHP version will not be possible for any length of time. It is years and years out of date, really insecure (look at what happened to this server) and many years past end of life. We are discussing this server at Management Level and we will make a decision on its future with a view to serving notice that we can no longer host these 6 websites.
28 March : 9am
Good Morning
I wanted to touch base and let you know what has been happening overnight. Overnight server 31 and php52 shared servers appeared to have packet loss. After investigation we determined that the server php52.bigwetfish.co.uk was saturating the network switch with 1Gbps of traffic which was also knocking server31 off line.
We had to stop the php52.bigwetfish.co.uk server and the issues were resolved instantly. Server31 is now back on line and working fine.
We are looking to see if we can determine the cause of the issues on php52 server and 6 client websites are off line.
A Little Background
php52 is a server with 6 clients on. When we upgraded our shared servers to the latest php versions we had about 6 clients whose website scripts were so old that their websites stopped working on the latest php version. As some of these clients had been very long term clients we did not want to simply ‘ditch’ them just because their website scripts were many years out of date. We therefore in good faith deployed a server for these 6 clients. We do make a loss on this server but having it resulted in their websites staying on line as this server is compiled with the old end of life version of php.
Unfortunately when scripts are updated they usually always have security updates so having a server with 6 websites that are many years out of date is perhaps on reflection a bad idea. Although we have not determined the cause of the data packets yet it will have come from one of these out of date websites. We will be discussing this among staff and we will make a decision moving forward on whether we can continue to host these 6 websites or whether we need to provide a backup and ask these clients to find a host that still uses php 5.2.
We are now checking the accounts on the server php52.bigwetfish.co.uk to see if we can determine the offending account that is being attacked and is sending 1Gbps of data causing the switch to saturate with data packets.
If you are one of the 6 clients whose websites are currently offline it is because you are on this php52.bigwetfish.co.uk server and we will be working this morning to see if we can safely bring this server back on line without affecting other clients.
