What's up with that?

Two different thing going on here. :) One is that at 1 a.m. Pacific time on the first Saturday of the month, the server farm where the BC-TS server is located does some sort of maintenance on connections. Basically, the server is unavailable to normal http: type traffic. The odd message about just being registered is the farm's standard placeholder which I've never got around to replacing for my base domain, qnezr.us.

The second thing is the database error some people saw; that is caused by one of three things: one is someone trying to do an injection-type attack on the site; two is some machine-type spammer trying to load crap in the comment system; three is just plain system overload from too many people trying to access the system, or certain parts of the system. Spammers are particularly active Friday to Monday for some reason.

One of the things overloading the system is a recurrent error message that I've been trying to track down. This is causing the system to log an error to the database several times a minute, and depending on what else is going on, it doesn't close its connection to the database when finished. So the database runs out of 'handles' for answering new requests. This is not a bug in my part of the code but is apparently a configuration problem with the server farm that causes a 'feature' of the Drupal software I run to act like a bug. I'm going to have to correct the configuration or else hack the code. Maybe Tuesday, since I am out of town again this weekend and don't have all my tools on my laptop.

The third thing some people may have seen lately is that I've taken the server down on purpose twice this week to do backups. The server is generally down for about 20 minutes when I do this and simply does not answer requests. The error you see depends on your browser. I'll be doing backups regularly on Tuesday morning about 1 a.m. Pacific time from now on.

Hugs,
Erin