Blah Blah Cafe, the Jean-Michel Jarre forum

Hello all,

I'm planning to migrate the forum to a new server/OS in the near future. Due to the overwhelming amount of bot-traffic to this website (for some reason) I am looking into measurements to take. This means an upgrade of the OS. The best way to do this is to do a clean install and add some counter-measurements with that.

This won't be done within a month, I will be migrating some other websites first to test. The Zoolook forum will be the last that will be moved. I will keep you updated here.

To give an indication: this is the CPU usage in the past month.

The past hour was crazy...

I added an extra core on monday to ease the pain.

This is disk usage in the past month:

You can see it at the start page:
In total there were 93209 users :: 21 registered, 3 bots, 1 hidden and 93184 guests active over the last 24 hours

These are mostly bots.

I have decreased the amount of forums and topics a Guest user can see, to reduce bot traffic. I will be migrating the forum itself to a new server soon, since I now have more time.

As a guest before I log in there are no forums visible, just says "This board has no forums"
I noticed last night over 1400 guests online & the forum had slowed to a crawl, took at least 2 minutes to load fully

The "guests" are bots (not identifying as bots) coming from a range of IP addresses which means banning an ip-range is more effective nowadays. It's almost giving me a headache.

Progress on the new server: I migrated jeanmicheljarre.nl there (and some other websites) and successfully installed Anibus. It does a bot check just like cloudflare does, which is good. I will do a migration of zoolook this week and I'll do some testing there too.

I will move the zoolook.nl domain to my own hosting provider. This means I have easier control over moving the site to a new server. I got the moving code from Beatle and I will move it tonight. This might result in a temporary downtime, since the DNS of my hosting provider has to propagate the settings to the old server.
Once that is done, I can start with the real job: moving to the new server.

Domain has been moved

I'm planning the migration on Sunday evening. It's usually the quietest moment.

Server is migrated. Also updated to 3.3.17.

If you experience any problems, let me know via email or in this topic.

Next step will be configuring Anibus for this website.

All good here, no issues so far

Anubis is now installed, so you are welcomed by anime girls now!

Guess when I activated Anubis?

downside is that the real visitors stats are a lot lower now...

I noticed the massive drop in members online yesterday.
Does it tell you how many bots it's blocked ?
Also yesterday log in was very slow on the PC, but just logged in on my phone and it was very quick

I have tweaked some things on the PHP configuration, the PHP-FPM engine was configured so that the process manager started on demand. I changed it to dynamic, which means there's less waiting time because the php process manager doesn't have to start up again. Also, Modsecurity was activated and having both Anibus and Modsecurity is a bit too much, so I turned that off.

I'll check the logs, but I think it's a more correct representation now. Anibus blocks almost all bots (and guests masking themselves as bots) except for google, bing and 3 or 4 others.

Checking the logs right now. Almost every user blocked was an alibaba-cloud bot and some Huawei bots. They were trying to scrape the website at certain locations at a steady pace (not too aggressively so that it doesn't strain the website much) which is an indication of "reconaissance" by these bots before actually doing the heavy work later.

Planning a migration to a newer server/OS.