Yup -- just got it a few minutes ago when clicking on my Favorites button for the Interchange. Went away when I Reloaded the page.


I am not a computer geek at all, but it sure looks to me like a "DDoS" = "Distributed Denial of Service", where nasties take over some servers and attempt to connect to a website millions of times, overwhelming the site's server(s).

This is the first time I have seen this happen when I tried to access this site. And I visit tis site several times each day.

Moderators and site admins -- Good luck in dealing with this!

Just got it again trying to get the the second page of this post

When I have seen this on other forums in the distant past, it has been because the amount of data (past posts, photos, etc.) stored on the server is reaching close to its allocated capacity, much like your computer bogs down incredibly if you hard drive fills up to near capacity.

This takes an administrator to rectify, if this is the case here--acquire/allocate more server space, delete or compress some old data, etc.

That can cause problems, but this error usually means exactly what it says "Too many connections" Too many users trying to access the website. There are 4 typical causes.

1) Configuration errors
2) The site has become popular and getting too much traffic for the existing server to handle at once.
3) DOS attack
4) Search engines hammering the site while "spidering" it. Some search engines, like Google are polite an limit the number of queries. Others just hit it as fast as they can. You can add restrictions in the robot.txt file, which may or may not be ignored by the search robots. Most honor them, some don't.

The problem, whatever it was caused by, seems to have cleared up, as far as I can tell. Is anyone still getting the error message?

Spoke too soon. Had it happen again a few times (but just a few, not ongoing) Friday evening. Wasn't anything compared to last weekend, however.

Ive now had it about five different times within the past 15-20 minutes between posting, looking at this thread, the air break vs. vacuum thread, and the 3801 thread.

Hi,

For what it's worth, I use Windows XP on an old system and do not have a firewall one. It brings my system to its knees when it is on.

I hit this error.

A few moments ago, I ran Malware Bytes Anti Malware. it found about 20 PUPs (potentially unwanted software). These are not not viruses but if you visit certain sites, they put PUPs to track you and alter ads for items you might be focused based on your internet web page access.

I do not know if this is your problem, but once they were deleted, I had no more problems.

Maybe this will help.

Doug vV

It might be the RyPN server itself being compromised. These days it's super hard to keep a server secure - you need a security staff big enough to send 3 people to the BlackHat conference. The server can get hit by malware that compromises the *server*. It's then used to send out spam email... used to compute BitCoin... used to crack its own password database, whatever they think they can profit off of.

Starting in 2010 I also saw an epidemic of web sites being hacked to create spammy web pages, they targeted reputable sites including .edu and .gov, and generated millions of webpages in obscure directories like /.images/ (note the dot), unbeknownst to the webmaster. The millions of pages force Google and Bing to ignore "nice" rules and crawl at a much faster rate, and worse, each page may be computed on-the-fly using PHP, which lags things further.


Standard malware detector trick: also search for easy, trivial non-security-threats merely to impress users. Malware should normally never find anything, but users get bored with that. It's hard to do "guard duty" when there's never anything there. So they jazz it up with junk messages to make the software seem like it's doing something. Junk messages are dangerous, ask anyone on Air France 232.

A firewall running as software on your main PC just doesn't work, and is false advertising. A PC can't secure itself, and an exploit against that PC will skirt around the firewall software. An effective firewall must be a separate piece of hardware, i.e. a NAT router. In fact consumer-grade NAT routers *by nature* provide a decent level of firewalling. Connecting a PC "bare metal" to the DSL or cable modem is sheer madness, because that PC has an exposed public IP address which is constantly being probed by the bad guys. There are only 4 billion IP addresses and only a few hundred million facing American consumers; they simply probe every one, generating 100 attacks a second isn't that hard, and you're done in a month even without stolen cloud-server time or bot-nets. A NAT router stops unsolicited probes: it is a middleman, a concierge to allow multiple PCs to share the IP address, and when unsolicited traffic arrives, the NAT has no idea which PC it's intended for. So it can't forward it to any PC. It's like sending mail to "Occupant"

Securing a Windows XP system isn't really possible anymore. You have to consider the probability that your firewall is not being overloaded by normal traffic, but by active malware.

Hi,



You are correct. Unfortunately I have an old slow hardware system running it (512 Meg RAM not upgradable to 1G and a slow processor). It does fine as an isolated machine most of the time. I connect to the internet occasionally with the machine and it works fine. All of my DOS programs work well on it.

I had the motherboard on my second XP machine (4Gb RAM and dual core CPU) crash. The WIN 7 machine (16G and 3.5(?) GHz CPU quad core) has a failure on it that might be the MBR or a bad file in the Windows start up. I tries to boot but locks itself down with a memory dump.

FWIW, Change is the way to survive in any sort of evolution. However, I still like Win XP better than Win 7. Lots of conditionals but I'd like WIN 7 have an XP-like desk-top and file system.

Of course despite my minority opinion, I still by and large like DOS 6 and WIN 98. Probably because I do not stream video nor am a big game player.

Doug vV