Anyone who plays on mine and Nikki’s network, The Beast (http://mcbeast.net), will be aware that our server is currently down. It’s been three, touching the forth, days of downtime. We have been working on the network for over a month now. We decided to start the network over a month ago and we’ve been working for the network every day since then to ensure our launch was a successful one. Everything was working fine, we had a brilliant run up to the start. An excellent website, backend stuff for staff (bans, managers, some minigame preparations), Teamspeak, IRC, and of course the actual server. There has been a lot of stuff done to develop each and every one of those to where they are now, including our exclusive Permissions plugin which is to launch soon. Everything was going great. We had our initial launch and we were excited to see the results. Unfortunately there were quite a lot of bugs to straighten out so we worked on those constantly and had a lot of those fixed. We had adjusted our plugins, configurations and actual builds to the feedback given, verbally or by actions, and implemented necessary additions onto the server. We had our second launch and spent quite a bit on advertisement for the network. We started to get players online. What happened and why it happened afterwards was a blur. I’m British, Nikki is Australian. I went to sleep at around 12AM and bugga was online making sure stuff was flowing smoothly. The server went down this date due to a spigot issue, this was the currentTick issue that you may have heard of. Due to this the server went offline as well as many other spigot servers at the time. When I came on and updated the jar it wasn’t working anymore. This isn’t because of spigot but instead it is an issue between the server and the DDoS protection. We use remote DDoS protection which gives us an IP for you to connect to. That IP is the IP that all of the clients, including us owners, connect to when we connect. From there the data is sent to the DDoS protected IP and the data is then filtered and sent to our server. Normally this can be achieved using a reverse proxy. However, as we run a gameserver it is better to use a GRE tunnel to achieve this. We use a TCP tunnel (GRE) to send the data from there to us. Why do we do this? We do this because this filters through DDoS attacks. Sometimes websites, servers, and other types of services get attacked with malicious packets which can affect the server negatively by either slowing it down or taking it down entirely, which is much more common. We use this protection which protects us from these attacks to a certain extent so that the uptime is greater for you, the player, and your entertainment isn’t being interrupted because of this malicious data. Currently we are having issues with this. As normal, the DDoS protection is forwarding us the packets and the firewall on the server is accepting them. I can see through tcpdump that we are getting that information. From there, however, is just errors. ifconfig tells us that the tunnel isn’t giving actual packets but instead frame errors. I’m not an expert on tunnels so I’m not sure why this is happening. I’ve been on and off with support teams. Our DDoS protection provider has helped a great deal and helped to narrow the issue down while our DC hasn’t helped us at all. This leaves me simply at a dead end. We are taking backups and considering final options if the DC doesn’t help us at all. The situation hasn’t resolved, however we have identified where the issue is at.
