An Introduction And Note On Some Recent Technical Issues

Before I go on about the issues that have affected this site for a while now, I wanted to take a moment to (sort of) introduce myself.

My name is Richard, and I’m the webmaster, cook and bottle washer for McHenryCountyBlog.com.   I’ve been working with mainframe and personal computers since 1978, employed in IT support roles since 1987, and put my first webpage up in 1994.  I helped Cal put his site up in 2005, and have done my best to take care of his tech issues since that time.

Like a lot of computer people who grew up with the industry, I’ve always relied on my knowledge and skill set to feed my family rather than formal education or maintenance of expensive certifications.  In the 21st century that can limit your options, so I entered McHenry County College to pursue an associate’s degree in Computer Science with a concentration on Network Security.  After a year in school and over 30 credits, my GPA is 3.89 on a 4.0 scale.

I only mention these unimportant and uninteresting details to establish that at least in my own opinion I do have at least two clues at any one time about both general issues regarding Internet security and performance threats for websites and the specific nature of the challenges and attacks that Cal has recently faced.

When you put up a website, you have to carefully plan the infrastructure that might be needed.  As Cal has always accepted only local advertising and has shied away from generic ads that has no local basis, the funds available to run the site have always been modest.

While Cal posted yesterday about the site being under attack, that was no exaggeration.  In the past month, the site has had a massive increase of “brute force” attacks, which try to exploit weaknesses in the structure of a website or poorly maintained web servers. Although we have had adequate server capacity for normal operations in the past, addition of these constant threats to our server load has pushed it into a coma at times.

Over the next few weeks, you will begin to see some changes on McHenry County Blog.  The site is being moved to a new and more capable server, with many optimizations and security upgrades that ought to make for quickly loading pages and a hassle-free experience in general.

Having said that, one inevitable change that is coming is the addition of a donation option in order to help Cal recoup the costs of a site that has grown far past the hobby stage.  If you value the effect this site has had on McHenry County over the past 10 years, that I hope you choose to throw a few acorns at the squirrels powering his webservers when you can.


Comments

An Introduction And Note On Some Recent Technical Issues — 10 Comments

  1. Interesting, Richard.

    Thank you!

    And thank you for having Cal’s back.

  2. A donation option is a great idea !!

    It costs people around $100.00 a year to buy a newspaper so why not subscribe to the blog.

    Cal, you are better than the newspaper and more honest.

    We can depend on you to report the truth and you have served the people in McHenry beyond what would ever be expected.You also are loyal to everyone and work very hard.

    My suggestion is to have people pay not just donate $50.00 or more a year to read and comment on your blog.

    Just a suggestion to a well deserved man.

  3. Make your donation as large as you can to allow some money to be spent on tracing WHO / WHAT / WHERE is attacking Cal’s blog.

  4. Connecting Dots, good idea and I think everyone would like to know that answer but I think that is hard to do.

    Cindy you always make a comment on my posts, what happened.

    Thank yous are appreciated but doesn’t pay the bills.

    Lets all donate when Cal lets us know where to send the check.

  5. Mark, we are using a third party host: Site 5.

    They have been excellent, we started the site on GoDaddy hosting and that was a nightmare.

    The problems we’ve had stem from attempting to be frugal as possible with server resource needs such as bandwidth and system memory.

    In today’s environment with a site that is bound to get noticed, prudence demands proper security measures. This all means more squirrels under the hood.

    I’m working now on transitioning the site to a new server that will give lots more oomph so as to not allow brute force attacks to be able to take down the site.

  6. You can’t put a price tag on one’s valuable time.

    But you can help pay the expense.

    Say when, where and how to help offset those expenses, for such an informative blog.

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