DDoS attack. Dolphin 7.0.2. Unity.

We have some updates and thoughts to share. The last week was quite chaotic and we're still in turbulence. We receive letters and messages offering tips and help, which is great and often helps. We are very grateful for support and patience that our community shows during these days. So...

DDoS Attack

It's not over. Sadly, such attacks are becoming more and more widespread and sophisticated. You might have heard that last year Twitter, Blogger, and even Facebook had hours of downtime and days of slow performance because of vast attacks. It may be hard to cut them off completely. Still, there're ways to surpress them and we have tried a number of things over the last few days. I'll try to give a general idea:

- BoonEx server at HFW is quite powerful and it could handle well over 1500 requests per second. So, it's not a matter of hardware capability, especially when you consider that "you can't outmuscle DDoS attack, you can only outsmart it".

- We have used different software firewalls and combinations of settings and it helped at some stage. Ultimately, the flow was so big that Apache couldn't even process requests.

- We went to ServerOrigin for help and they are filtering our traffic now. See chart below:

Basically they are using mixes of hardware firewalls, load balancers and proxy servers to filter out abusing IPs. In our case it's still not simple, because requests come from a great number of IPs and with changing patterns. Still, about 90% of them are filtered.

- Failover-protection setups are not applicable now, since BoonEx server, per se, doesn't fail and even if we had a server farm of mirrored boxes, that would still boil down to a war of resources, not solutions.

- Moving BoonEx.com to any other host, cloud, server is not a quickie and should be done at better weather.  So, once we are back to normal loads, we'll start moving to a host with included enterprise-level DDoS protection. Currently we are considering softlayer, gogrid, EC2 and rackspace.

Dolphin 7.0.2

No panic here, it's almost ready and should be available in a day or two. We are moving service callbacks to background, following the latest few bug reports, and preparing upgrade script. Dolphin 7.0.2 will also be available at a separate download location. Your site with 7.0.2 will no longer be affected by BoonEx.com performance/uptime (except for the initial license registration).

Unity

We are preparing some minor changes at Unity, which you will see gradually appearing...

Blogs will be removed from homepage or Blogs homepage. They will remain a property of Profiles only (except for BoonEx blogs). This is done to limit advertising and conversation (which should happen in Forum) on Blogs. Users would have more freedom in their blogs, but their blogs would be read only by those interested in the particular author, or when it's contextually linked from Forum.

Market will receive "Staff Picks" section, where we'll be featuring some of the best extensions available at Unity, as per BoonEx staff opinion.

We're playing with the idea of adding something similar to "global categories", like "dating", "facebook", "adult", etc to group extensions, jobs, and possibly forum posts into niches.

Note, the best place to get updates if BoonEx.com is down is twitter.com/boonex. If Twitter is down (happens more often than with BoonEx), then facebook.com/boonex. If BoonEx, Twitter and Facebook are all down, then have some sleep or watch a movie and come back.