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GearHead is down

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Michael:
Early this month, the GearHead site (gearheadrpg.com) went down.  It's currently showing a hosting company page.

I contacted Joseph Hewitt about it, and he said those pages are still handled by Chaosforge.  So it's an issue here.

thelaptop:
It was the subject of an attack.  I'm not sure if the server administrators has deemed it safe enough to bring back the server.

I'll inform KK and see what he thinks.

Michael:

--- Quote from: thelaptop on January 23, 2014, 00:53 ---It was the subject of an attack.

--- End quote ---

Not too surprising.  For a long while before it died, the site was serving SEO spam to anyone looking at an interior page with a User-Agent not whitelisted by the attacker (thus showing the SEO to Google but hiding it from normal users.  I noticed because they forgot to whitelist Lynx.).  I brought this up once and Joseph fixed it, but it reappeared soon after.

I guess they got more arrogant and did something that couldn't be ignored....

Kornel Kisielewicz:
It's not due to spam attacks, it's due to us loosing finally the old server. We're working on getting the page back up.

Michael:
I notice it's partially up now.  "www.gearheadrpg.com" still doesn't work, but "gearhead.chaosforge.org" partially works (it didn't at the start of the crisis).  The main problem is that most internal links, including stylesheet links, are absolute and thus go back to the still-broken gearheadrpg.com domain.

WHOIS shows Joseph owns gearheadrpg.com directly, so I guess it's up to him to update the IP address.  I tried hacking my DNS to override *.gearheadrpg.com with the IP address of gearhead.chaosforge.org, and that seems to make it work fully for me.  (Although I haven't tried posting anything.)

The SEO spammers seem to be gone, for now.  That's nice.

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