Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Barry / Media City Paper Online Woes
Posted by Bruce Barry on Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 4:04 PM
SouthComm's le gros fromage Chris Ferrell puts the kibosh on that bit of paranoia with word that CP online outages began with a server relocation last weekend that left in its wake problems with the site's firewall. Monday's lengthy outage was caused by a denial-of-service attack (yes, hackers going after the CP!) that came at a particularly inopportune moment -- "They caught us at a moment when the firewall wasn't there," says Ferrell -- bringing the site to its knees. Today's midday outage was triggered when a link from a high-volume aggregator sparked an unmanageable surge in traffic -- a capacity issue also related, Ferrell says, to the server relocation.
Ferrell, who sums up the online woes of the last few days as "a series of unfortunate events," also wanted to reassure loyal Scene readers that its online presence still resides on (pre-acquisition) servers out west, and has accordingly been unaffected.
Update (9/3, 1 pm): SouthComm's IT types clarify that Monday's outage was triggered by a Drudge link to a CP story, not an intentional DoS attack. Wednesday's outage was related to an Instapundit link, they say, with the aforementioned server and firewall issues contributing to both. Early morning outages today were a result of overnight work on these issues that took longer than expected. Ferrell tells Pith this afternoon that CP servers are now "in much better shape to handle traffic surges."
Comments (12)
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It's flaky again. You would think they could get their act together. BTW: CHEEE chaîne SouthComm, Chris Ferrell
I'm confused. On Monday, City Paper made the front page of Drudge Report (see upper right: "Students to hold swine flu 'bonfires'"). Making the front page of Drudge is frequently crippling for websites. Is that separate from the DoS attacks?
The problems have been going for much longer than this week. The site is unavailable for long periods of time at least once a month. Each time the excuse is the old "we were upgrading the servers" or "we were switching to a new system", etc. The latest is this dubious "DOS attack" excuse.
The people at the Scene should be very afraid to go on SouthComm's servers.
If there is one good thing to be owned by a corporate behemoth who don't know or care to know about the city and have no understanding on how to put out a good paper--it's that their servers are strong.
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=67&aid=169508
This is why the servers went down.
