Brandon Miller Posted January 31, 2014 Posted January 31, 2014 Anyone else having trouble accessing Brickset? Quote
TheLegoDr Posted January 31, 2014 Posted January 31, 2014 Yes, it has been down for the last few days (at least whenever I've tried it). They are transitioning to a new website and the newsfeed did have multiple posts about server being down. So I guess it just hasn't been fixed yet. Quote
Dr Leg O Brick Posted January 31, 2014 Posted January 31, 2014 (edited) Yes, I've been trying all day, and yesterday. Even the forum's down, I could access it yesterday but no luck today. Before it did go down, there was a few news articles about it being a problem with the Firewall or something like that, Huw was contacting the server provider. Funny enough, I was going to make a topic like this, I thought I was going mad, usually Brickset's always up, I only remember two instances since 2008 or so when the whole website went down. The new ones up on the 3rd, I believe. Edited January 31, 2014 by Dr Leg O Brick Quote
arc Posted January 31, 2014 Posted January 31, 2014 I believe huw (founder of brickset) said he's moving the database to a new sever. the new site is down too. Quote
Godtshep Posted January 31, 2014 Posted January 31, 2014 Yeah, I'm having trouble with Brickset. The new site should be active on the third apparently. Quote
jfbat Posted January 31, 2014 Posted January 31, 2014 I believe huw (founder of brickset) said he's moving the database to a new sever. Yep, he posted that message on brickset yesterday, and said the site would be down quite some time because of that. There's been some trouble over the last few days with servers. Also, they're busy migrating to a new site-layout. Quote
gratefulnat Posted February 1, 2014 Posted February 1, 2014 I certainly am aware of the migration taking place, and that it has been difficult to access the site over the last few days. After buying a few new sets yesterday, I thought I'd still try to update my collection. After numerous login attempts with error messages, I closed the page. Being stubborn as I am, I thought I'd give it one more try, loaded Brickset successfully and discovered I was already logged in. Wierd. Went to my_sets and nearly pooped my pants - my collection has dissapeared! I now own 0 sets... (should be over 650, nearly all with added ACM info) I really really hope this is just an anomaly due to migration to the new server and starting up the new site. Time to drink tee until the new site is up and running, too terrified to even want to try accessing the site anymore... Maybe a stiff whiskey would be more appropriate than tee right now, I'm so flustered. Huw does a great job, so I'm trying to convince myself everything will turn out fine. Quote
Sir Brickalot Posted February 1, 2014 Posted February 1, 2014 I've just been trying to get on to the site, but with no luck. Glad I found this thread! Quote
Eurobricks Emperor Bonaparte Posted February 1, 2014 Eurobricks Emperor Posted February 1, 2014 Went to my_sets and nearly pooped my pants - my collection has dissapeared! I now own 0 sets... (should be over 650, nearly all with added ACM info) I really really hope this is just an anomaly due to migration to the new server and starting up the new site. I'm pretty sure Huw takes regular backups of his site, so no worries. Quote
gratefulnat Posted February 1, 2014 Posted February 1, 2014 I'm pretty sure Huw takes regular backups of his site, so no worries. Thanks for the reassuring words, Bonaparte. I know you're right, but a lot of hours of work have gone into that, so I'm nervous (the whiskey did help though ) And in the background, my teenage son is muttering "first world problems, dad, first world problems..." So I'll sit back, stay cool, and wait and see what happens. Quote
TheLazyChicken Posted February 1, 2014 Posted February 1, 2014 Yep, it was for me. I was trying to see what were the set numbers for some sets, and they wouldn't appear. Quote
dutchlegofan50 Posted February 1, 2014 Posted February 1, 2014 This must be a nightmare for Huw and I sympathize with him. Some months ago my web shop was off-line for about two days (and I lost orders). I had to work on it day and night because the site was hosted in The Netherlands but the programming work had to be done in India...... Anyway we all do miss Brickset, don't we? Quote
gratefulnat Posted February 1, 2014 Posted February 1, 2014 Here I am worrying about my collection, and Huw is dealing with about 60K's worth of people's collections. Talk about about perspective... Anyway we all do miss Brickset, don't we? Yes, I really do miss it Quote
jfbat Posted February 1, 2014 Posted February 1, 2014 Hmm, a day has passed and the site is still down. That's slightly worrying... Quote
Paperballpark Posted February 1, 2014 Posted February 1, 2014 (edited) From what has been posted on www.bricksetforum.com (which has been up continually, although the styling isn't always great), there were issues a few days ago which they were having problems sorting out, so it was decided to move the site to a new server. That necessitated a change of IP address, which can take up to 48 hours (or even sometimes a bit longer) to propagate throughout the internet. Basically, for up to 48 hours after the site has changed server, it can still be unreachable for some people. Apparently though, there's the possibility that there's also a DDoS attack underway, which won't help things at all. Oh and I think Huw said in one of the posts about the issues that he'd be delaying rollout of the new site until the issues had all been resolved. Edited February 1, 2014 by Paperballpark Quote
tkatt Posted February 2, 2014 Posted February 2, 2014 Brickset is one of the greatest Lego sites. I hope Huw knows what an asset he is to the Lego community. Quote
legolijntje Posted February 2, 2014 Posted February 2, 2014 I'll qoute some things from Huw from the Brickset forum, so anyone who doesn't read there, but does read here knows what's going on: OK, so here's the story. The site was hosted by Northstar, run by Eric Smith, now BrickLink admin. He sold the business to OnRamp Indiana a year or so ago. It remained on the same hardware and has been running perfectly well, until Monday last week. Then I started seeing loads of network related errors from the front-end which couldn't connect to the back-end database, and database timeouts. ORI said the Northstar network infrastructure was to blame and that the solution was to move it to their servers/network. That started on Thursday. It should have been a straightforward job but it took 3 days, until yesterday when they finally got it up and running. However it's now using a SQL Express back end instead of SQL2008, on the same server as the front-end, which is not ideal, because they claimed that it was overloading their SQL server. It was still incredibly slow as the CPU was constantly 100%. It *could* be because of a DoS attack overloading things, I'm personally not convinced and I will investigate further today. As it stands now, I've taken the old site offline and run up the new one (at new.brickset.com) and the CPU is averaging 25% with c.250 users so it appears to be holding up. *If* it is a DoS then the pages the attacker is requesting on the old site won't be served which will prevent the database and server being overloaded. I'l leave in that state today to see what happens. Do let me know how it is for you. I am thinking of moving to a managed and monitored hosting solution with guaranteed uptime and SLAs, from a UK based company. (The US/UK time difference has proved frustrating). It will be far more expensive but obviously need to do something given the site is my livelihood now. Anyway, thank you for your patience. I sincerely hope I can get everything back to normal soon. No data has or will be lost: I have backups on my local PC taken every day last week up to 31/1/14. Nothing entered yesterday or today should be lost either, but I would advise against making a lot of changes just in case. It turns out there *is* a DoS underway, from a German IP. I've taken steps to minimise its effect but more needs to be done because I suspect the requests it's making on the server is hampering legitimate network traffic. Quote
lord raphael Posted February 2, 2014 Posted February 2, 2014 The new brickset is now working.Just went on it 5 minutes ago.http://new.brickset.com/browse Quote
LukeWarmTea Posted February 3, 2014 Posted February 3, 2014 Oh I love the new look site! But what's a DDoS? It sounds worrying. Quote
Crackerjack Posted February 3, 2014 Posted February 3, 2014 Oh I love the new look site! But what's a DDoS? It sounds worrying. Digital Denial of Service attack which is an attempt to make a machine or network resource (in this case Brickset) unavailable to it's intended users. (us AFOL's) Quote
Hey Joe Posted February 3, 2014 Posted February 3, 2014 Here I am worrying about my collection, and Huw is dealing with about 60K's worth of people's collections. Talk about about perspective... Keep in mind that you can export the data you've entered into the site. It's a little late for that now, but for future reference it might be useful. Anyway, Huw mentioned that he did daily backups, so it shouldn't be a problem. Maybe just don't try to change your data until he gets it sorted. Jod Quote
Faefrost Posted February 3, 2014 Posted February 3, 2014 Oh I love the new look site! But what's a DDoS? It sounds worrying. Dedicated Denial of Service. It's where thousands of remote controlled bot computers (typically malware and virus infected user PC's) are used to try and overload a web site or a point on the internet such as a key router or DNS server. Quote
meyerc13 Posted February 3, 2014 Posted February 3, 2014 Digital Denial of Service attack which is an attempt to make a machine or network resource (in this case Brickset) unavailable to it's intended users. (us AFOL's) Actually, DDoS is Distributed Denial of Service. Which means that instead of the attack coming from a single source that can be easily blocked, it is coming from a botnet with many hosts spread out across the globe. From the posts above, it seems that this isn't a distributed attack, but rather the overload is coming from a single IP. If that is the case, it should be extremely easily to rectify. The first step is for the ISP to block the IP at their perimeter, which should free up the server CPU but might still result in the site being unavailable if the attacker has a bigger pipe than the ISP. If that's the case, the attacker can consume all of the bandwidth of the ISP. In that case the ISP needs to start working their way back up the stream to the attacker's ISP. You continue to block the traffic at steps along the path until service is restored. This is extremely simplified, but at a high level that's how you deal with a DoS attack. I happen to work in this field for a company near the top of the Fortune 500, so this is something I know all too much about. Quote
RubeusHagrid Posted February 3, 2014 Posted February 3, 2014 Huw is posting updates here: http://www.bricksetforum.com/discussion/13805/brickset-com-site-issues#top Unfortunately it is looking highly improbable that the new site will be launched to fanfare today as planned due to the server issues. Quote
gratefulnat Posted February 4, 2014 Posted February 4, 2014 Things are looking much better now, Huw has done amazing work. Most of the site seems to be back up and running smoothly. THANKS HUW , hugs & kisses Keep in mind that you can export the data you've entered into the site. It's a little late for that now, but for future reference it might be useful. Anyway, Huw mentioned that he did daily backups, so it shouldn't be a problem. Maybe just don't try to change your data until he gets it sorted. Jod Thanks Jod, you're absolutely right about exporting one's own collection, except the additional ACM info isn't included (or I don't know how to include it ) - and that's where lots of time/data important to me, would have been lost. I'll still wait a few days before updating my collection, no problem, but man am I relieved to see things getting back to normal. Quote
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