Crossposting to LJ throttled; LJ imports slow/failing

[denise]

As LJ has now officially confirmed that they're experiencing a DDoS attack, and a pretty nasty one at that, we've throttled the rate at which we attempt to crosspost entries, and reduced the number of times the process will try before it fails. (It was five tries at an interval of 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes; now it's three tries at 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes.)

You don't need to do anything differently when posting your entries, but if you receive a failure notice after the third try (which should happen around 20 minutes after you try to crosspost your entry), wait a while and then try to crosspost again, by editing the entry, making sure the crosspost box is checked, and saving the entry.

If the crossposting continues to fail after that, just hang tight and wait a day or so before you try again. LJ's operations and engineering teams are doing everything they can to restore access to the site, including restoring the ability to post from elsewhere using the LJ protocol (which is what the Dreamwidth crossposter uses).

Importing from LJ is also affected by this, obviously, which is driving up the import queue. If you can, please consider waiting a few days to import your journal from LJ -- the process is likely to fail right now anyway. If you get a failure in your inbox when trying to import, just hang tight and try again in a few days.

If the traffic situation at LJ continues to worsen, or if the backup gets too large, we may temporarily disable LJ as an import source, in order to let the queue clear out a bit. If that happens, I'll post here about it again!

We wish LJ and the LJ team the absolute best of luck in dealing with this situation, and we hope that they can recover quickly!


EDIT: And the slowness on our end that some people were noting turned out to be another stuck process and Apache in general sucking up too much memory. alierak is monitoring and fixing.

EDIT #2: (1) The problems on our end involve some bug that's causing the webservers to work too hard that we're trying really hard to chase down the source of. If DW is slow or sluggish for you, that's the cause. We've put some measures in place to deal with it temporarily, and we're working on tracing down the root source of the problem. It's not traffic-related!

(2) If you comment, please try to keep it on the topic of Dreamwidth, not LJ -- we'd like to avoid the comments turning into a LJ-bashing session. Thanks, all.

Comments

[naraht]

Thanks for keeping us updated on this!

[keris]

Thanks! Yes, I noticed the slowness (and hoped it wasn't an attack of your own), but ... I couldn't get in to post about it! I don't see any way round that problem...

[pinkadot89]

I assumed the slowness was caused by an influx of angry LJers. :P

I'm glad you're working on it though!

[digitalsidhe]

Thank you to the Dreamwidth team for all your hard work on this... and for keeping us updated! (I'm sure the LJ team would like to keep us updated, but since we can't seem to load any pages over there... heck, they might be posting updates every 15 minutes. I have sympathy for them.)

[marilla_pm67]

Thank you for telling us LJ is under a DDOS attack .. at least now we know.
And on my end, the site (DW) is still very slow, BUT loading, that's a plus:)


Thanks
sam.

[nightdog_barks]

Thank you for keeping us updated and in the loop! ♥

[hellkitty]

Actually LJ's been awful about updating. We had to discover about the DDOS through other sources. HOURS later they confirmed it. Their lack of communication, honestly, is irritating more LJ users than the DDOS. People are patient when they know what they're being told to be patient for.

[cmcmck]

Many thanks.

I've just got in from work and wondered why you were running a bit slowly. I was concerned you were being hit with the same problems as LJ!

[ninetydegrees]

Thank you very much for the update on DW's slowness. And virtual cookies to alierak!

[olchik]

could you help point me to a resource that would help import entries from LJ? I would also like to backup my LJ with comments - do you know who makes that possible?

Thanks for the update!

[denise]

You can import your journal, with comments attached, to your Dreamwidth account (although please do wait a few days until LJ is no longer under so much load), or you can use a program like LJ Backup (if your computer will run it) or a service like LJBook (which turns your entries and comments into a .pdf file for you)!

[olchik]

Thanks so much for the prompt reply!

[irish_dragon]

you can do it via DW, but you should probably wait till the lastest DDoS attack subsides the other is LJArchive, which is free.

[olchik]

Thanks!
I did try something once and for some reason was unsuccessful :(

[irish_dragon]

either way you should probally wait till the DDoS subsides and the traffic dies down, b/c if you can't access the servers, you can't access the blog to back it up.

[olchik]

yup, I will wait. I have been on LJ for 8 years and don't want to leave but the frequency of these attacks is making me worried.

So you guys are saying that there's a way to crosspost entries here and on LJ? Would you mind explaining it in more details?

[irish_dragon]

If you go to Manage accounts in the bar to the left if that's where it is for you, it's going to be in the tab on the left "other sites"

You should be able to set it up from there...

I've also been on LJ since 2004, so after the DDoS attack the first time around I started using DW more. I'm just slowly building up to paying for a year

[le_monde]

Infrequent LJ updates can be found on Twitter, and you don't have to be a registured 'twit' to see it. :)

[surrey_sucks]

Thanks for the update. I am very concerned that LJ might die, so I will be importing my entries as a backup, but I will wait a while until things calm down.

[denise]

Just to clarify a bit --

Crossposting is setting it up so that you can post to LJ as well as to DW from the Update page. You set that up on the Other Sites tab of the Account Settings page -- once you set that up, there'll be a checkbox on the Update page that you can check (or uncheck) to post to LJ. (It also works to post to InsaneJournal, and we used to have a few other LJ-based sites available as well, but sadly, they've closed since or have bugs that prevent it from working.) In the future, we'll be adding other sites such as Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, etc.

Importing is pulling data from LJ (or another site) into your Dreamwidth account -- you set that up with the link that a few people gave you earlier.

Both of them aren't going to work very well right now, because LJ is having network access problems due to the DDoS, but that's how you set them up, at least!

[olchik]

Thank you, Denise!

[desds]

After this latest attack I've decided to leave LJ all together and use DW as my permanent journal site. Thanks for keeping us in the know.

[rebeccathefiddler]

The lack of updates from LJ (SUP) is more than annoying, it's a concern from my POV. At least one earlier report implied that the actual servers had been hacked (not just shut down by a DDoS attack), and I have seen at least one posted report of LJ's own Apache server logs being publicly available when this first started last Sunday. That reads more like an actual hack to me.

[digitalsidhe]

Darn. I was afraid that might be the case, but wanted to give LJ the benefit of the doubt. I thought, "Hey, maybe they've learned something about communicating with their userbase since the Six Apart days..."

I guess not. Silly me.

[arethinn]

I'm sure the LJ team would like to keep us updated, but since we can't seem to load any pages over there...

status.livejournal.org is hosted differently and loads. I would have preferred more detailed/frequent updates there, myself.