Reply To: Internal Server Error (Probably error 500)

PennController for IBEX Forums Bug Report Internal Server Error (Probably error 500) Reply To: Internal Server Error (Probably error 500)

#8071
Jeremy
Keymaster

Hello,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention, and apologies for the inconvenience. Our servers were targeted by a DDoS attack over the weekend, ie. we were flooded by multiple concurrent requests, which led the servers to crash. I blocked the IP addresses responsible for the attacks and proceeded to some cleanup, things should be back to normal now. No data was compromised by the attack (ie. your login credentials and existing results are safe) but if participants tried to take your experiment between April 15 13:00GMT and April 17 16:50GMT, chances are they either couldn’t open the page or couldn’t submit their responses

I understand that such downtime episodes compromise the process of collecting data, and even though we do our best to prevent them, some aspects of a big scale open service like the PCIbex Farm are harder to anticipate. Both PennController and IBEX are under open licenses and free to use. In particular, anyone can host experiments on their own webserver by following the instructions on the IBEX manual. Adding PennController is as simple as adding PennController.js to the js_includes folder of an experiment (note: if setting up your server, multimedia resources should be placed in the www folder, not in chunk_includes—csv files should still live in chunk_includes)

We will let you know in advance by sending an announcement email when we proceed to maintenance operations

Thank you for you understanding,
Jeremy