I know alot of you visit Vodhin.org on a regular basis, but unfortunately – due to improper hotlinking from many external sites – it has temporarily gone offline as of July 28th. A similar event happened last year for this very reason. I certainly hope that RCTDb did not aid in it’s hiccup, as I have linked only to the download page, and not a file hosted on the server. Please, let’s all let help out by not hotlinking his files (ie: vodhin.org/downloads/somecoolfile.zip – not the real url, but you get the idea), and instead just link to the site (vodhin.org). Bandwidth costs a significant amount of money, and until you operate a website, you don’t know how big of an issue it really is.
Vodhin has been generous enough to offer his webspace to host any custom files you may have created. Unfortunately, a large resource has gone offline and users cannot access said files. I’d like to help out with this in any way possible, starting with making the files widely available. So please, don’t hesitate to send your files our way.
Straight from Vodhin.org – as of July 29th, 2010
What happened is that there has been – and continues with greater resolve, an attack against php based websites, against a certain CMS based website spicifically, and the old site was hammered with thousands of bad requests from a number of robots that were trying to add malware to the our files.
While the attacks were unsuccessful in injecting the malicious code into our server, the sheer number of attempts were enough to overload the server and prevent tthis and other websites from loading. The attack continues right now as you read this, and so I have decided to dump the a certain CMS CMS system since the develpoers have not been able to offer a fix (which would require re-writing the entires CMS, something that is already in the works anyway) and my web host has decided not to support a certain CMS based website for now.
The bots have been using Google to locate these sites, and will more than likely evolve to atack other php based websites in the near future. With that in mind, I’ve decided to hold off on restoring this website until I learn more about ways these “bod bots” can be stopped. I had already implimented a trap to serve these bots a Forbidden page, but the number of attacks grew to a point where the server just could not handle the real requests, let alone serving the forbidden page.
So, My website will remain closed for a while, but not to worry, I have backed up the database (in full this time) and I will archive the downloads that were hosted here (that, as of this writing, is still a work in progress). Hopefully we will be back up and running by September 2010, but to what level I don’t know…
Let’s hope for the best.
-T10
