Yes; there was a problem for about half an hour.
I pressed the wrong button in one of the admin pages (was using a phone – never a good idea 
) and it triggered some database search which doesn’t have an index, and that just hangs the server. No way to stop it either, short of rebooting it, which I didn’t want to do in case it breaks something.
Don’t ask me why it hangs – my hardware and software development has always been with real time systems where different tasks have their own thread but evidently web servers don’t work that way
This afternoon I couldn’t connect to this site. It said too much traffic.
Peter wrote:
I read that but it is all trendy BS
Not at all. As far as I can see the Wikipedia page uses technical terms correctly and describes what a CDN is in a perfectly good way.
No, no issues at all.
Peter wrote:
HTTPS is absolutely pointless for 99% of websites, but nowadays you get screwed from both ends, since google is downranking HTTP sites.
Well, quite a few providers and corporate ISP’s do not allow going onto non-https sites anymore. I had to upgrade mine to allow me to access my own site from certain places.
Yes, terrible, terrible, terrible, that in the 21st century one can set up an https website without handing over a few hundred $ a year to the paragon of corporate trust called Verisign
Previously, people used to get free certs from some outfit in Israel, but they kept expiring and after you had to pay for half a day of some (reluctant) person’s life to sort out a new one each time…
Hmmm, perhaps I should encrypt all the traffic on my LAN here with AES1024
It wasn’t so long ago that both Eurocontrol sites crashed, because they used expiring certificates to encrypt inter-server links and somebody forgot to set up a “process” for making sure it was somebody’s job to keep them from expiring This happens regularly even in the biggest companies…
Simplicity is the way to go…
HTTPS is absolutely pointless for 99% of websites, but nowadays you get screwed from both ends, since google is downranking HTTP sites.
Peter wrote:
Yes but it can be non-expiring, and you create it yourself, for nothing.
Ah, Cloudflare will accept a self-signed cert? I see.
Yes but it can be non-expiring, and you create it yourself, for nothing.
No such thing as “set it up once” in IT. Everything breaks eventually and then you have to throw money at somebody to fix it. And usually you pay heavily because every programmer hates fixing somebody else’s stuff. The only thing which is free in IT is something that doesn’t exist in the first place.
The real art in IT is setting things up so you are not dependent on any one person or any one system. And set it up so that disaster recovery is simple – a one button click restores an image backup, or some such. This usually means keeping things very simple.
Peter wrote:
But yes it sounds like a network of proxy servers
So-called “reverse” proxy servers, that’s my understanding, yes.
Peter wrote:
I though that’s what the internet did: delivered content
Yes; these guys do it fast at large scale, that’s all. Their scale also allows them to better ride out (D)DoS attacks.
Peter wrote:
I wonder how this outfit makes money. Who is going to pay for a proxy server unless the upstream data link is crap?
My understanding is that websites pay them to “deliver their content”. They may have a “no-money free” tier for “small” websites, but big ones pay. These guys have their “reverse proxy servers” on all continents, “closer to the end-user”. When you get to the scale of e.g. CNN, well, one upstream data link will not suffice, so instead of each of CNN, NBC, etc building their own planet-wide (or at least “North America-wide”) network, they contract that out to Fastly, Akamai, … which build one network for many customers. Also, for some customers the (D)DoS protection alone is worth paying for, even if the upstream data link is not the issue in normal times.
Peter wrote:
EuroGA uses Cloudflare which is a proxy but we use it for more mundane reasons, like dealing with https certificate hassles
You still need a valid X.509 (“https”) certificate on your server behind Cloudflare, for the connection between Cloudflare and you, don’t you? So how does Cloudflare help in “dealing with https certificate hassles”? (On a sidenote, Let’s Encrypt made that very automated, set it up once and then forget about it.)
Peter, CDN is more like a local cache with a lot of bandwidth, used for static content.
Lower latency for the customers, less traffic to your website.
That way you customers need to go your site for the dynamic content only.
Well, not to your website directly – typically to the Cloudflare, then to your website, but you see the point.
I read that but it is all trendy BS
Content delivery – wow wot is dat? I though that’s what the internet did: delivered content
But yes it sounds like a network of proxy servers, which is why the chap who reported this was seeing funny error messages which were nothing to do with our server. I wonder how this outfit makes money. Who is going to pay for a proxy server unless the upstream data link is crap? And it should not be crap; there is a vast bandwidth across the Atlantic today; much more than needed apparently.
EuroGA uses Cloudflare which is a proxy but we use it for more mundane reasons, like dealing with https certificate hassles; straight bandwidth allowance is a very long way from being an issue (a factor of 10-20). I also put CF on my own website for that same reason. But they are free for nonprofit users.
