An Orion riddle

[Gwaihir]

There's trouble with Orion http (and SMTP) service. Been that way since I woke up this morning. Support assures me the machine itself is doing fine though. They say it's the network status screen that's wrong in giving a red X most of the day (for only those two services). They're looking into that, but well.. what priority does one give to a malfunctioning indicator light, right?

Meanwhile I can't reach my site via http. Not from here at home nor via the proxies I tried. Every so often some data is exchanged successfully for a minute or so, but most connections just time out. So, I think the red X is spot on and fear something more elusive is in play that has disrupted traffic to / from this machine. Firewall? Routing? Load on the machine is VERY low (0.0x - 0.20), which could also indicate few of the http requests actually reach it.

After exchanging ticket pleasantries for most of the day now, it still seems 'they' want to see some more evidence / complaints before calling in the heavy honchos in weekend to start cracking this one down. So, please fellow users, let me know what (differences in) http responsiveness you see between:
- http://www.jaguarpc.com (included as reference site, on JPC Houston)
- http://orion.nocdirect.com (shared server's own http 'site')
- http://www.gwaihir.net (my site hosted on it),
as well as with your own sites if you have any affected ones.

[Ron]

Sorry you're having trouble.

I see your site and the orion CPanel page just fine. Your site loads VERY fast for me.

I went to http://www.megaproxy.com/freesurf/ and cut and pasted your URL in, and it came up fine there, as well.

Good luck.

[Gwaihir]

The problem has been identified and fixed now. The server was getting maximum HTTP hits from an IP that was causing Denial of service for the other users as Apache was not able to handle more requests. That IP has been blocked on the server and httpd is now working fine. The netwok status page is now reporting green light for httpd service.

Looks like they've found it It's back up for over 10 minutes now, which I hadn't witnessed so far today. Now hope the attacker won't just switch to another IP (but since it was just one IP, chances are it wasn't meant as an attack anyway but rather was someone screwing up some software).

EDIT: Ron, thanks for the assistance