Quick outline:
Text of the email sent to Classcaster users this morning:
You may have noticed that Classcaster has been unavailable or especially sluggish over the past couple of days. This is due to a series of ongoing attacks against WordPress systems worldwide. The attacks against Classcaster continued unabated for most of the night. There were over 100,000 bogus log in attempts made on the system in the past 24 hours. The effect of this activity has been to make Classcaster unresponsive and to cause delays in the database that have rippled over to the main CALI web site.
It is important to note that there is no evidence that any of the attacks have been successful. A thorough review of all backups and the database system indicate that all Classcaster data is intact.
I have implemented a number of security measures to protect against the attacks but because of the variable nature of the attacks these have been only partially successful. The next steps in securing the underlying WordPress system require the installation and use of more sophisticated software that requires a more powerful server.
Today I am planning on isolating the Classcaster database so that it doesn\\’t interfere with the main web site\\’s database and moving the WordPress backend to a more powerful server in the cloud. Typically I would do these sorts of things over a weekend, but because of the impact the attacks are having on all of CALI\\’s systems I can\\’t wait. The process of upgrading Classcaster will result in some downtime for the system.
I fully realize that this is not the best time to do this sort of work, but it is not something that can be delayed. I expect to have the work completed within the next 24 hours. While the work is underway you may not be able to use Classcaster. I would strongly recommend that you do not try to add or edit any content on the system for the next 24 hours or until I give the all clear.
If you want to monitor progress of the work on Classcaster, you can monitor this blog, http://edev.classcaster.net/, or twitter account, http://twitter.com/ElmerDev.
If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.
Thank you.
First things first, letting everyone know about the problem and the solution.
Here’s the last 24 hours of Classcaster CPU utilization. We’ve been under pretty much constant attack without well over 100,000 bogus login attempts from hundreds if not a thousand or more IP addresses. At this point the real problem is that the volume of the attack is swamping the server and the link to the database. The solution is a bigger server and an isolated database. I will be spending the day rebuilding Classcaster to be more hardened against these attacks.
Moved the eLangdell bookstore and the forthcoming eLangdell Course Resources sites to new homes. Same URLs, just more spacious servers.
Doing some sys admin housekeeping this AM. Silently moving things around on the backend to hopefully increase performance on the front end.
Little of time back with pressbooks. Working on getting the first of the eLangdell books into the site. When done we’ll have a website for each of our books.
Running up an instance of the PressBooks plugin for WordPress. Elangdell books become websites.
Renamed the files and got all the styling to where I can live with it. Uploaded to Classcaster, activated it site wide. Now everyone on Classcaster can use the [lessonview] short code to add Lessons to Classcaster blogs. See a sample at http://cca.li/lJ
Tuning up the Lessonview plugin for Classcaster to let authors add Lessons into Classcaster blogs.
