PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

A forum has been created for discussion of the Ninja Network Party and badge:

[forum=575]The 2011 Ninja Badge / Party[/forum]

The 2011 Ninja Badge / Party
(Temporary Description) This private party is NOT run by Defcon Staff, but is instead created through hard work and contributions by Ninja Networks for many people at Defcon. (site) , (twitter)

GreatScott! let us know there is need for two forums for entertainment he manages:


[forum=577]The DC19 "Chillout" Room and lounge (Room #1 of the Rio Pavilion)[/forum]

The DC19 "Chillout" Room and lounge (Room #1 of the Rio Pavilion)
Your hacker oasis in the Vegas desert! A place to socialize, kick it, and partake/watch contests that merge hacking and the arts. (twitter), (FaceBook)

[forum=576]DC19 Official Pool Parties // Music Action[/forum]

DC19 Official Pool Parties // Music Action
Live music. Hackers. Sunburns. (twitter), (FaceBook)

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

I received an email message back from TommEE that the Cannonball Run should be returning to Defcon 19, so I have made a forum for it, copying the description from last year. TommEE says a site update is planned:

[forum=580]CannonBall Run[/forum]

CannonBall Run
The CannonBall Run to DefCon (site.)

Spot the Fed is run by Priest. He almost never checks the forums, but he is over on the dc-stuff mailing list. I add a forum for "Spot the Fed" so people can choose to share ideas if they want to. You should not expect Priest to post anything in this forum about the contest, or answer any questions about it. Really, it has been run so many years, and the rules are so well established, and so many years of questions and answers about it are stored on these forums, that it is unlikely that you will find a good question about it that nobody has ever asked before.

[forum=579]Spot the Fed[/forum]

Spot the Fed
The one and only Defcon "Spot the Fed" Contest

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

I received word from tprophet that there are plans to bring QueerCon back to Defcon 19 and are talking to organizers about space for it.

A forum has been created for this:

[forum=572]QueerCon[/forum]
Open to everyone, but goaled to including GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered) Hackers at Defcon-- its a party within Defcon! (site) (facebook)

I've included a temporary thread until something official is posted.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

For around 20 minutes, maybe longer, the forums and pics server was unreachable but running. DT found the access problem and fixed it. Access should now be restored.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

It fixed the issue I was having with accessing the forums without going through a proxy. Thanks for keeping after the issue.

Thanks for offering to provide a proxy through your IP to help with testing. I would have taken you up on it, but had made arrangements with Chris.

Thanks again to Chris, DT, and people that provided information on what networks were not working with the firewall and people with offers to help with the diagnostics.

-Cot

[DaKahuna]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

It fixed the issue I was having with accessing the forums without going through a proxy. Thanks for keeping after the issue.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

DT verified that traffic was not getting to the network the forums used, too, but there was some traffic on the outside of the firewall that was not getting in.

After several tests, borrowing access to an IP address donated to me for service and diagnosis (Thanks to you Chris!), DT thinks he has found the cause for many people being unable to access the forums. In taking to him, it sounds like it may be a bug in the way that features are implemented in a new firewall after an upgrade. (Yes, I am purposefully being generic in explaining the problem.) DT may or may not follow-up here with more details on this issue.

Right now, I see our number of active sessions has jumped from an average of around 28 since April 12 to 112 users (which has been the low water mark for "normal" use), and this does not even include the search engines, which usually account for around 20-30 active sessions.

More work and diagnostics may be required, so if you have not been able to visit the forums since April 12, understand there may be future outages to come while the exact problem is diagnosed and a trouble-ticket/bug-report is sent to the vendor.

I've been announcing service outages and testing related to this on:
https://twitter.com/tcmbc

Thanks!
-Cot

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

As part of a diagnostic step, i will be bouncing services to pics, forums, testforums, and tamperevidentwiki. They should be back in about 10 minutes or so.

Services should be restored. The results suggest there is no problem with the servers denying access. Still trying to find a cause for this denied access to some people.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

As part of a diagnostic step, i will be bouncing services to pics, forums, testforums, and tamperevidentwiki. They should be back in about 10 minutes or so.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

DT found an issue with the imported ssl cert on the firewall from last sunday's firewall upgrade where some users that did not have the manually installed cert from 2007 found ssl cert errors claimed from different web browsers.

He ditched the old cert install n the firewall that was part of the upgrade and then re-imported it again into the firewall and now the browsers we tested that were complaining about the ssl cert no longer are complaining about the ssl cert.

It is possible that this is the cause for some forums users to be blocked from access to the forums while other users or users that tunneled their connections to other networks were able to see the forums.

This issue also impacted www.defcon.org and media.defcon.org when using https, and in my tests against media.defcon.org using the browser that complains about invalid ssl certs for www.defcon.org and forum.defcon.org, an error about connection timeout was reported when trying to browser to https://media.defcon.org/ from the stock client while the client with a previously manually import cert from 2007 was able to connect without trouble or complaint, both from the same IP address.

There may be more issues. Please let us know if you still have problems using https to any of these servers:

* www.defcon.org
* media.defcon.org
* forum.defcon.org
* pics.defcon.org

[Dark Tangent]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

There has been someone doing a TCP Fragment reassembly DoS against the web server, but besides that I haven't been blocking any IPs. Please report address ranges in a PM to keep it private, but it really helps us with debugging any network issues.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

I have not been able to duplicate this from my networks.

Isolated problems from certain IP to Defcon Forums since yesterday. If this is a problem for you describe & email defconforums@gmail.com

You don't need to give your forum username, as we can look that up, but if you observe this as a problem from home but not at work, then the IP address block of the problem would help. You can give a /24 range, or just the IP address of the next hop beyonf your local network's default gateway.

With enough reports on this, maybe we can diagnose the problem. So far, reports have been primarily from Comcast, but other Comcast customers have said there were not problems.

Thanks!

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Since email from forums for new accounts, password reset, thread and PM subscription is working, I have altered the rules to remove reference to contact defconforums@gmail.com for all of these while it was broken.

The thread that described the problems with email from the forums not working has been soft-deleted (until it is needed again.)

I received information from EvilMofo on a description for the HackBus forum, and it has now been set:

The Hackbus is the most entertaining method of going to Defcon from the SF bay area. It also carries passengers to the Defcon Shoot and the Toxic BBQ. (Site), (Twitter), (Facebook), (Forum(external link))

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Access to pics is restored,but upload of images appears to be broken, and is probably a server issue now and no longer a firewall issue, but the cause of this error is not logged, so it will take some time to track it down.

I have something else that is higher priority to finish working on before diagnosing the upload fail on the pics server. At least it is now possible to view images that are on the pics server.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Now that email service from forums is restored, I have sent out a notice for email confirmation to all forum accounts that have "unconfirmed email addresses" so users can confirm their email address and use the forums. This should also include people that tried to reset their password while email service from the forums were broken.

In 2 weeks, any accounts with zero post count and unconfirmed email addresses will be deleted,freeing those usernames for other people to use.

I have already deleted several accounts that lead to email message bounced back to us with permanent email failure due to invalid recipient addresses.

Thanks!