I heard from an IT security guy at Lockheed, it doesn’t sound like anything untoward is happening there, just a dozen or so people within Lockheed’s system hit the website during the same period in the morning and were clicking away on the links. That combined with my usual heavy morning traffic took our server over the top. Sort of a “straw the broke the camel’s back” scenario. In other words, if all those hits had been coming from different servers, it would have looked like a normal traffic surge, but since they came from one it had us concerned.
So, if you’re at Lockheed and like to check Wildsnow.com, please try again if you’ve been getting blocked. I never set up a block, but my server company put one in while we were figuring this out; I asked them to take it off just a moment ago.
Lastly, we’ll try to do a few tweaks on the server that make it better at dealing with our traffic surges. Whew, what a saga! Pray your blog doesn’t get this much traffic, otherwise you may never ski again as you deal with all the issues (smile)…
Check tomorrow for our Friday photo contest, and feel free to click that mouse — might as well keep the load tests going as we tweak this thang.
WildSnow.com publisher emeritus and founder Lou (Louis Dawson) has a 50+ years career in climbing, backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering. He was the first person in history to ski down all 54 Colorado 14,000-foot peaks, has authored numerous books about about backcountry skiing, and has skied from the summit of Denali in Alaska, North America’s highest mountain.
