Internal Server Error (Probably error 500)

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

Viewing 3 posts - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #8067
    Carlos
    Participant

    Sorry for posting so many times. However, I want to report that I have been getting frequent Internal Server Errors in PCIbex from yesterday to today. I also wanted to know what the cause of such errors is and if there is anything I can do to avoid such a situation.

    As far as I experienced, PCIbex was down from 13:30 to 14:30 JST (4:30 to 5:30 UTC) 16 Apr, and was down intermittently several times after that. During this time, I logged into the PCIbex farm, but I encountered errors when uploading and deleting files in the PCIbex project. Meanwhile, sites of experiments did not work, showing the error message: We’re sorry, but something went wrong. If you are the application owner check the logs for more information.

    Also, from 17 Apr at 21:30 to 18 Apr at 0:25 JST (16 Apr at 12:30 to 15:25 UTC), attempts to log in to the PCIbex farm all failed due to Internal Server Errors. The experimental sites did not work, either.

    The web browser’s console showed that an Error 500 occurred in the above-mentioned cases. Could you please check if there was anything wrong with the server during, at least, the time period noted here? Also, could you please let us know if there are any scheduled downtimes (e.g. server maintenance) that have stopped the PCIbex servers recently or in the near future?

    I am sorry for asking you many things but I would be grateful for your help.

    PS. The similar server error was reported on here too: https://www.pcibex.net/forums/topic/randomization-mixes-the-sentences-in-the-csv-file/#post-8066

    #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

    #8075
    Carlos
    Participant

    Hello, Jeremy,

    Thank you for your reply. Little did I suppose that there had been DDoS attacks… I really appreciate your efforts to restore the server.

    As you advised, I would like to host my experiments on my own server too, and I understand that csv files and multimedia files require different folders to be uploaded.

    I would like to thank you again for all your time and effort in maintaining PCIbex.

    Best,

    Carlos

Viewing 3 posts - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.