Tech: 'Access denied' - what's up?

Subject: Tech: 'Access denied' - what's up?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 08:58 AM

For the last few days every time I've tried to open up the Mudcat I get instead a blank screen with the message "Access denied". At first I thought it must be the Mudcat being temporarily down, though I've never seen that message with it before. But then I went to the Mudcat Face, and found out the Mudcat was working properly.

All my other bookmarks were working fine, and this problem came up the same whatever browser I used, and even after a system restore, so I emailed Joe Offer on Sunday, and he wrote back "a few people have been getting the "access denied" message. I can't figure out why, so I'm forwarding your message to Max to see if he can help"

Anyway I still get access denied on my computer, so today I dropped over to my son's place and had a go on his Mac, and no problem.

So I thought I'd post this and maybe find out more.

Subject: RE: Tech: 'Access denied' - what's up?
From: Leadfingers
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 10:03 AM

Ive had the 503 message in the morning a few times , but I am sure that was Max working on the 'Search' problem ! It was Up and running ach time by MidDay

Subject: RE: Tech: 'Access denied' - what's up?
From: katlaughing
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 10:21 AM

If it worked on your son's, that would indicate a problem with your browser, wouldn't it? Or, I mean the settings within each browser. It's been fine here, using the latest Firefox.

Subject: RE: Tech: 'Access denied' - what's up?
From: Max
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 10:36 AM

McGrath,

Let me know if you still have the problem tonight.

I think I might know why this is happening. I've been fighting some spiders, worms, crawlers and robots, and even one hacker lately. They've been crashing the site (that's the 503 error and offline message).

In this process, I've been blocking IP's at the server level. I turned all that off yesterday though, so anyone that was getting access denied should be OK now. Please let me know if that is not the case.

Max

Subject: RE: Tech: 'Access denied' - what's up?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 10:44 AM

I've noticed those late night 503 messages after midnight your time, Max. There are some really nasty things floating around out there lately, but I haven't heard much discussion of it in the news. The recent rebuild of my software platform (upgrade to Win7 Ultimate) was precipitated by trying to torque up the security settings.

Still having trouble with messages not posting to threads (had to open a new browser to post this one).

SRS

Subject: RE: Tech: 'Access denied' - what's up?
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 10:55 AM

I still get them occasionaly:( Both from home and work

Dave

Subject: RE: Tech: 'Access denied' - what's up?
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 11:11 AM

Sorry - should have clarified. It has been happening today (17 Feb) - Not sure if it still as as it didn't happen all the time anyway. And when I re-submitted it generaly went OK. Out of interest if I re-subbed a post on a thread it lost nothing. If I re-subbed a PM it lost the text.

Hope this helps

DeG

Subject: RE: Tech: 'Access denied' - what's up?
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 11:12 AM

Spoke to soon - Got the problem again but I don't know if it is the same one -

Error Occurred While Processing Request

Error Diagnostic Information

An error occurred while evaluating the expression:

(len(trim(FORM.UserName)) gt 0) and ((left(FORM.Subject,3) is not "RE:") and (FindNoCase("http:", FORM.body)) or ((len(FORM.body) - len(replacenocase(FORM.body,"http:","","ALL"))) gt 10) or (FindNoCase("sites", FORM.Subject)) )

Error near line 21, column 38.

Error resolving parameter FORM.USERNAME

The specified form field cannot be found. This problem is very likely due to the fact that you have misspelled the form field name.

The error occurred while processing an element with a general identifier of (CFIF), occupying document position (21:1) to (21:234) in the template file d:\!webserver\mudcat\htdocs\ThreadNewMess-Sub.cfm.

Date/Time: 02/17/10 11:10:57
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Remote Address: 194.106.220.83
HTTP Referrer: http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=127418&messages=6

Subject: RE: Tech: 'Access denied' - what's up?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 11:52 AM

I'll check when I get home, Max, and send an email, if the problem is still there. And post here if it isn't.

503 messages are familiar enough - but "access denied" was a new one to me.

Subject: RE: Tech: 'Access denied' - what's up?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 01:17 PM

Bingo, you've cracked it Max. I'm no longer excommunicated...

Subject: RE: Tech: 'Access denied' - what's up?
From: Rowan
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 04:17 PM

Last week I got similar messages but all were quite late on Max's time so I just put them down to him working on the 'cat, dealing with Searches and worms.

Only lost one posted message and all's good at the moment.

Cheers, Rowan