Downtime and recovery - April 14, 2012 04:40 PM
So, we managed to spin the bearings on this thing pretty good about a month ago. We put it up on jackstands and try to figure out what to do next with it. The result is positive but time consuming. Many of you know exactly what I'm talking about when it comes to failure and recovery in relation to our cars... and my metaphor.
Sorry for the downtime, but wrangling time out of a handful of very busy people and then coordinating that time to get this sort of work done takes time to complete. It's the nature of the beast.
We're back now and there have been some modifications made in the meantime. The negative beside the downtime is we've lost a lot of data from the last 5 months of TECH postings. We're working to restore this now, but we decided it's important to just be live again so people can access the information we're preserving instead of worrying about 5 months out of 14 years of data being 100%.
Part of the struggle was trying to recover on what we thought was solid hardware. After mucking about a bit we decided to back up a click and just replace the entire database side of the architecture. The web side will soon benefit too... we just ended up rushing the next hardware migration in the end. IT folks know this sort of thing doesn't happen over night, particularly when you start relatively flat footed. The big positive is the new hardware is significantly faster and once we get things stabilized, we'll look at getting the web server piece sped up as well.
Anyway, I want to thank Greg, genic and awesom-o for their assistance in recovery and we want to thank you and our sponsors for your patience. Welcome home!!
Written by Dallas DamonZ
Fixes for Chrome - May 23, 2010 11:29 AM
Fixes have finally been put in place so that you can edit your mods using Chrome. Also, all text input boxes have been fixed so posts don't artificially wrap when using Chrome.
Enjoy!
Written by Greg (Dallas)
Hacked update - May 22, 2010 03:57 PM
We have recovered from the SQL injection attacks. No data was completely lost OTHER than customized bookmark descriptions. All bookmark descriptions have been reverted to the subject of the message that they bookmark.
Code has all been updated to prevent most if not all of these attacks in the future, so we are completely back online. All forums have been restored and are operational.
First name entries in the profiles were wiped out. I know many of you are aware of this. Please update your profile and put this information back in. It will stick now as we are repelling the attacks, which continue to occur on a daily basis.
Thanks for your patience as we worked through all of this.
Greg (Dallas)
tt.NET hit by botnet attack - August 11, 2008 01:04 PM
***** READ THIS *****
At some point over the weekend we fell prey to a botnet attack named asprox that is pretty nasty. Anyone who attempted to open the Tech forum over the weekend since we were infected may have themselves been infected with this malware.
Read this article from Symantec which describes what files may have been installed on your system.
You can also google asprox for additional information. We are taking steps to make sure that we do not get infected again.
Thanks,
Greg
Happy 10th Anniversary TwinTurbo.NET! - June 04, 2008 10:43 PM
Wanted to put this in the NEWs for the archive as well as have posted it in the General Forum yesterday on the 3rd:
As far as things on the internet go, 10 year is forever. We never really thought about things this far out from 1998, but here we are close to 3.5 million posts about a car that's been out of production since before we got started.
Looking forward now, we're working on some changes to take the site into the next decade. Greg and I don't have time to do much more than manage the site anymore, so we have assembled a small team to tackle some expansions/changes to the site we've been wanting to implement for a bit.
As always we owe our success to you, our membership for keeping things active and interesting around here and our sponsors for helping keep the power on and the bits flowing.
Thank you all for making it what it is and what it will be!
Happy 10th Anniversary TwinTurbo.NET!!
-Damon
THANKS to all of you for creating the community that we all share. We just created some code and launched the site, but you guys have given it life (life I'd like to smack sometimes.. but I digress. :)
It really doesn't seem like it's been 10 years ago that I first met Damon at a dyno day. I'd had my NA for a couple of years and hadn't interacted with any other Z people at that point. He took me for a ride in the Green Queen and I just about peed my pants. I bought a POP charger that day and never looked back, lol.
I don't get to spend much time on the site any more, even during the 10th anniversary as today is my 8th wedding anniversary (yes, I don't mention tt.NET to my wife today), our son turned 1 last week and our daughter turns 4 tomorrow, so it's just a big celebration right now!
We do have some things in the works... don't we always.. and if I can wrangle a bit more time we'll get it all out there and going. Thanks for sticking with us for 10 great years. It will be interesting to see what the next 10 bring us... hell our cars will officially be classics by then!
-Greg
Search Changes and IE7 - March 18, 2008 12:42 AM
Finally after a year or so I was able to sit down and do some work on the forum. You should all now notice that the search results page shows up properly without the 'double' display of junk at the top of the messages.
Auto-indexing is implemented but I'm still having a problem with it that should be sorted out in a few days. Once that's done all forums will be kept up to date as posts are made.
Also, thanks to Damon we have a fix for the message preview popup not working in IE7. This should be working now. If you continue to have trouble with it, please post details or email us.
Z1's sponsorship - March 07, 2008 09:12 AM
Recently, there has been a rash of Z1 Classifieds posts being VTD'd. In the interests of fairness, we investigated just to be sure that it wasn't the same small set of people able to repeatedly kill the posts. We had been making adjustments to the number of votes required to VTD a post (we do this periodically to keep VTD balanced properly, often in the General forum) during this time. After increasing the total required significantly, posts were still being deleted by an ever increasing group of diverse members.
Three nights ago, 3/4/08, Russell from Z1 decided he wanted to know the total number of VTDs required to remove a post in the Classifieds forum. 3 distinctly 'Z1' profiles were created (shown below in the screencaps as Josh@Z1, Will@Z1 and Nick@Z1) specifically to VTD a slightly older Classifieds post by 'predator' as coordinated with other existing Z1 accounts and hangers-on:
Normally we would not share this information, but we feel this case warrants complete transparency.
I was in contact with Russell emailing him that we were monitoring the situation in Classifieds and were making adjustments between the time he posted about the VTD count and when I researched to see where he figured out the number. Once I saw the VTD'd Classifieds message done by them, I just logged the info in my head and found it ironic that he would complain about VTD abuse and then perform it.
Contrary to what some of the community may believe, Greg and I have always prided ourselves on remaining vendor neutral and never taking sides for or against any vendor, including our sponsors. We believe that this neutrality is one of the core values and benefits of TwinTurbo.NET. If a vendor does something that needs to be called out, it doesn't get swept under the rug. Likewise a vendor has every right to respond to any valid or invalid criticisms in a public way so we all benefit. The only time we typically remove these kinds of posts is when they devolve from point-counterpoint into direct personal attacks.
This leads to Wednesday night, 3/5/08. I wasn't online from Wednesday afternoon until about 9pm that night. When I logged in, I found odd emails and IM's from a few members who were getting red VTD boxes about messages of theirs from years ago. As I gathered information from the forum and emails/IMs here is what we determined...
Z1 (representatives/affiliates) decided to VTD a list of messages posted on the General forum, dating back for several years that were in some way disparaging to their company. They did this by blatantly exploiting the VTD feature by adding more new 'Z1' accounts and utilizing them in a systematic attack to VTD this list of posts along with other hangers-on like before. On top of that, Z1 found a way to VTD posts that by normal interaction with the site is not possible.
OK, LOL. We stole your design... Gosh darn those Z1 boys..Driving the car is the best way to find problems..Just road in Z1motorsports "PeaceMaker"...I ordered a Z1 ECU day after I put injectors in, and turnsZ1......and there stage 3 turbos. VentingIm having some trouble with Z1 Motorsportsif your comfortable with Z1, then you have been scammed.Won't that make the dyno chart not a good chart??Nice ECU's you have for sale on your website.For all members that have fully built Z1 engine...Well, your first mistake was going to Z1...nice car, but...Let me ask you a question Michael...My experience with Z1 Motorsports>>>>I do not recommend Z1 MotorsportsWas anyone else on this forum involved with the Z1 Volk GTCHeh, I suspected as much. >>>>>Watch out for Z1!WARNING! do not purchase engine from...whats up guys? I have another post of bad Z1 packaging.Except for the fact you didn't install the rear bushings...Warning: Z1 Motorsports...Well, I'm never going to Z1 again...Guess what..Z1 did it againHelp please! Question for those with Z1 GT600R kit...
With this group of accounts:
And specifically the accounts created to help the organized effort:
screen cap of list:screen caps of member profiles from this list:
These accounts are still there now and can be looked at through member search, but will be removed shortly.
In the past when an individual takes it upon themselves to obviously violate the spirit of the system by creating any amount of dummy accounts required and VTDing a post solo, we would ban the member, delete all the accounts, and restore the message(s). Our response for exploiting a hole in the system depends on the severity of the results of the exploitation.
It is obvious to us that Z1 planned and executed this knowing that it would not be considered good conduct. What really surprised us is that they chose to do this while we were in active dialog with them about the VTD situation against their posts.
We have tried hard to remain neutral but this type of behavior is not becoming of an organization that we want to be associated with. To that end, we have terminated Z1's sponsorship of this site.
Our 10th Anniversary Year! - January 04, 2008 12:11 AM
Going live June 3rd 1998 was the end of a flurry of activity that started when Greg and I were at a Z meet. I was sitting at the table with the gang talking about what I'd like to do about this lack of a good forum once TwinTurbo.COM had hit the crapper. I didn't really know Greg from Adam, as I had only shaken his hand and looked at his Z at a meet a few months prior. He's a Z guy, he appeared pretty bright, and he just happened to be sitting in earshot of me listening to what I wanted to do and confidently volunteered to help.
10 years later a lot has changed & a lot hasn't. The Z32 was never in production (for the US) while this site has been live and it amazes us what the following for it is still like a decade after we started. Granted the audience is shrinking since time and accidents have taken out a chunk of the fleet, and the potential joy of ownership along with them. The new members joining us have to look harder and harder to find something of high quality, but they are still out there and generally come from enthusiasts who have to part with their prize possessions. There are those that buy the lower dollar fix-r-uppers and use the site for more then what we intended, not just maintenance, but we see people talking about 'restoration' now. Very odd, but a sign of the times. Then there are those that just buy the low dollar fix-r-uppers because they are more affordable than they were 5 years ago and drive the hell out of them for that joy of ownership (welcome to the club!). On the other hand, even after all this time we really don't care what color you paint your calipers.
Thanks to everyone that has been along for the ride, be it a day or the entire ten years, members and sponsors alike for making TwinTurbo.NET what it is! We'll be doing some new things in 2008 to celebrate our 10th year supporting our favorite sports car legend -- the Z32. As always, stay tuned!!
Thanks! - October 01, 2006 06:08 PM
The Cliff notes: If you donated to the hardware fundraiser Kenny ran these past weeks for us, from all of the tt.NET staff... thank you!!. If you want to get back to the action click Forums->General in the menu. Otherwise, here's the longer story:
A little over a month ago, we were working on the database server when something locked up and we needed to reboot the machine. The reboot, unfortunately, failed. This resulted in a small scramble to get things back online in a limp-home mode. To repair the problem, we were going to have to spend some money and time.
Not to go into a lot of detail, but while advertiser's dollars pay the 'rent' for bandwidth, we tend to push the remaining money back into the community with things like hosting the annual convention dinners, sponsoring the ZCCA Dallas convention, etc. Our account stays fairly empty and setbacks like this DB server crash are usually resolved out of our own pockets.
We now have the DB server back up and running as you have probably noticed with the site speed getting back to what it was before. Back when the DB server crashed Kenny started IM'ing me about offering help. I wasn't really sure what he could offer besides some advice/information which is always appreciated, but he's insisted he had a plan to 'help'. We started talking about some other potential things to do to the site besides just getting the DB server back on track (haha... pun intended) that Greg agreed would definitely enhance things around here. But to support those things we needed to upgrade some hardware. Remember the part about out of our pockets? Greg just built a house and I'm in the process of building one, and neither of us are bachelors with a bunch of extra money to blow on modding cars or servers as much as we would like (damn responsibilities!). So we were stalemated until advertising dollars piled up enough to do something about the situation. Those that have been around here know that we do not and never will beg/ask people to donate money to keep the site alive.
Kenny decided to short circuit that logic and start a donation campaign to raise money for new hardware from the membership here. As you've seen over the past week or so he'll pop up with an update of totals, etc. The membership has donated $4,595.28 (we let Kenny include sticker sales as donations during the fundraiser) of which the site gets $4,372.08 after PayPal takes it's bite of the pie chart. We've already bought the new search engine software we've been using since the spring on a trial basis which has sped things up considerably and having a license for it expands some capability in the software we'll explore in the future. We've made a list of hardware/software to make improvements on all the tt.NET servers we can afford on the donation budget and it will be getting purchased on Monday after being evaluated for compatibility and performance.
Needless to say we're all floored with the amount of money raised since Kenny had arbitrarily picked out $2,000 as a goal at the start of the fundraiser and you far exceeded it... but every bit gets rolled into improvements to the site and allows Greg & I to concentrate on the things that can't be bought (tt.NET software updates) instead of finding money to fix a problem.
The tt.NET staff thanks all of you who donated and especially Kenny for organizing and executing such a thing. Absolutely amazing!
Back running on two servers - September 20, 2006 01:23 PM
We've managed to rebuild our crashed database server and did some software upgrades at the same time. It is back live and we are no longer limping along on a single machine. Hopefully the site will be a bit quicker although we still have more things to do in the future to speed it up more.
