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    In order to protect our members and TFL from possible litigation, all members must abide by the following new rules:

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    Posts that do not follow these new guidelines will be altered or deleted by staff. Members who continue to violate this policy may lose their posting privileges at TFL.

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Any other AOL users having problems after the recent maintance?

hoytinak

New member
Using AOL (I know it sucks but I get it free) TFL won't load the page fully (ie...report button, smileys, edit button, the red circled cross showing new post and the ones I've posted in, pretty much everything but the links themselves)....I can see where everything should be though as it's got a white square with red cross in the middle of it. Everything comes up fine when using Windows Internet Explorer though. :confused:
 
Can you use Mozilla firefox? I couldn't even remember how to fire up explorer even if my life relied on it!
Brent
 
it may be something in your aol settings. i sometimes have trouble loggin in. both aol and ie. i'll login in, try to reply to a thread and it will ask me to login again, and again and again. each time after i enter my username and password. so iclose the page wait a few minutes and then it works. what i don't like is the page timing out or expiring,especially within a long post reply.
 
The maintenance was unrelated. /var was corrupt for some reason so TFL was temporarily down to fix that. Then the database server's new kernel had the wrong network driver (intel 1000mbit ethernet chips now have different drivers depending on whether they're pci or pci-e), and I'd forgotten my password on that machine which led to an annoying time trying to get back into that machine to fix the kernel, because grub was horked and I couldn't see the menu to get it to boot from the old kernel, so I could log in remotely.

I started thinking about implementing some network filtering on clients that initiate a ton of simultaneous TCP connections, and AOL would in fact be slowed down by that, but right now that firewall rule is only logging so I can gauge what effect it would have.

TL;DR: Nothing I'm aware of should be affecting AOL users.

AOL is terrible in a number of ways. Its browser is perpetually behind in features and security; its proxies initiate ridiculous numbers of simultaneous connections (most from slightly different IPs) to cache webpages and content for AOL members. Haven't they heard of PIPELINING? The only thing keeping me from blocking AOL outright is that their users don't deserve to be banned from TFL because of AOL's stupidity.

AOL users need to be aware that their internet experience may be negatively impacted by common sense measures taken by webservers, measures that shouldn't negatively impact any properly-behaving web cache or web browser.

Humor of the day: try a whois for the IP 219.134.242.67, which was doing some SSH login bruteforcing against TFL:
netname: BIG-CUSTOMER-DEPARTMENT
descr: BIG CUSTOMER DEPARTMENT IN COMPANY
address: INFORMATION VITAL POINT MANSION 18TH FLOORS
country: CN (no surprise there)
 
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