CGI abuse

**NexDog** · 03-13-2002, 11:07 PM

At about 11.45pm CST 13th March, the Alpha server slowed down almost to a stop. Mike and I noticed it as did quite a few people that could get on chat.

It took 3 minutes to get a command line and when we did, it wasn't pretty. We found a cgi script, admin.cgi, was hogging 100% CPU for about 5 minutes and even hogged 45% memory.

This behaviour is unacceptable.

Repeated system abuse will result in the deletion of all your accounts at HostNexus. Please do some research on certain scripts you wish to run if you are unsure of the load they bear on the machines.

roly · 03-13-2002, 11:13 PM

Will we loose CGI

Who was that?

mobstory · 03-13-2002, 11:23 PM

It wasn't me was it???

**NexDog** · 03-13-2002, 11:29 PM

No, as we monitor the servers quite heavily, we notice problem immediately and can kill anything that's causing a strain. But, I hope some people can use common sense with cgi.

**NexDog** · 03-13-2002, 11:31 PM

It wasn't you, Debbie, and I'm not disclosing the culprit's name either.

mobstory · 03-13-2002, 11:42 PM

It's best not making it public

I do hope that you will tell me if something of mine is causing a problem tho, I"d be more than happy to replace whatever. I dont think it's fair to other users to hog the system.... but what if you don't know you are??? I'm trying to use php and databases as much as possible and my cgi's are usually something small now that I don't use yabb (I never knew it was such a burdon on resources)

03-14-2002, 12:18 AM

Quote:

Repeated system abuse will result in the deletion of all your accounts at HostNexus.

Please define "Repeated system abuse".

I'm not knowledgeable enough in cgi to know what will cause a problem. I feel if you make a threat like that, I should at least know what is going to get me kicked out.

**NexDog** · 03-14-2002, 02:24 AM

Hi Grumpy,

It's not a threat at all. It's just a fact and you can read our TOS/AUP in the FAQ section for clarification.

Most incidents like this are quite innocent. People run certain processes without knowing the damage it can do. That's why we would never remove a domain or an account for a single case. We would tell you there's a problem, give you the proof if you require it and ask that you refrain from using it.

If you run it again, we will deactivate it. If you try again, we will replace the file with a text read me file that asks you to contact us. If you run it again, the domain is deleted. If you still don't get the message, bye bye to your account.

As you can see there is a process, it's quite fair and it's there in the interest of everyone else who uses the server.

The script has to be massive or contain some nasty loops to almost shut down the server. In this case, the script was written by a developer. He modified it with a subroutine and when it ran, it just went ballistic. We had to deactivate it right away as the server load was spiking around 40. Before we could get in contact with this client, he re-uploaded the script and ran it again just after I posted this thread. That was when we killed it and replaced it with a text file asking to contact support.

He did, we worked on his script (quite an amazing piece of code actually), removed the loops and reran it. It now performs ok.

If you are a developer, we ask that you test scripts on a local machine by running them and running a "top" command at root before uploading to a commercial machine.

03-14-2002, 10:14 AM

Thank you.

**NexDog** · 03-14-2002, 10:20 AM

You're welcome, Dog!