BetaMountain.org

A short note on what happened...

phpBB, forums in general, are targets for bots and the Queen's agents and about a year ago I locked the forums down into read-only mode. About three months ago, something latched on enough to really give the mySQL server a run for its money and I put the forums into an offline mode.

Since then I've have done some things locally as improvements:

• Migrated the server from bare metal to proxmox
• Stood up a new Ubuntu LAMP server
• Implemented fail2ban
• Hardened some things a little more than I had in the past (this is a never ending struggle)
• Migrated my wiki installs to the latest

I let that new server run for a bit to make sure that was somewhat stable.

This morning I

• Duplicated the phpBB database
• Did the db conversion using the old server (yay for proxmox and virtual machines)
• Migrated the db over to the new server
• Installed the latest phpBB
• Hardened some settings in phpBB
• Added an extension or two designed to fight the bots
• phpBB is back online

I'll see how it goes. With proxmox I can snapshot the server and attempt changes without the fear of losing the entire server, so upgrades should happen more frequently.