HI,

Please have someone take a look, this issue has our forums offline.

Thanks,

Guy

It's the holidays. Did you mark your ticket as critical?

As mentioned it is a holiday weekend and your ticket was not marked as critical, I have responded to your ticket however, thank you

HI,

the Ticket system won't let me select a package, it's not working as expected, so that's why I couldn't mark it as critical. Thanks much for responding, I tried to upgrade to the latest version of the forum, but...The Auto updater isn't available, the forum is creating an extreme load on our server and causing it to become unresponsive.

Please update to the latest version, I applied the patch for the 3.3.x version we have now but that isn't working. Will using 3.4.x help at all in this ?

Your reply said we looked to be ok? The data center sent this today:

Further checking we have found the following errors in the /home/american/public_html/forum/error_log:

[29-Dec-2012 02:12:01] PHP Warning: require_once(/home/american/public_html/forum/admin/sources/base/ipsRegistry.php) [<a href='function.require-once'>function.require-once</a>]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/american/public_html/forum/index.php on line 23

[29-Dec-2012 02:12:01] PHP Fatal error: require_once() [<a href='function.require'>function.require</a>]: Failed opening required '/home/american/public_html/forum/admin/sources/base/ipsRegistry.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/home/american/public_html/forum/ips_kernel/') in /home/american/public_html/forum/index.php on line 23

[29-Dec-2012 02:12:01] PHP Warning: require_once(/home/american/public_html/forum/admin/sources/base/ipsRegistry.php) [<a href='function.require-once'>function.require-once</a>]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/american/public_html/forum/index.php on line 23

[29-Dec-2012 02:12:01] PHP Fatal error: require_once() [<a href='function.require'>function.require</a>]: Failed opening required '/home/american/public_html/forum/admin/sources/base/ipsRegistry.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/home/american/public_html/forum/ips_kernel/') in /home/american/public_html/forum/index.php on line 23

[29-Dec-2012 02:12:01] PHP Warning: require_once(/home/american/public_html/forum/admin/sources/base/ipsRegistry.php) [<a href='function.require-once'>function.require-once</a>]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/american/public_html/forum/index.php on line 23

[29-Dec-2012 02:12:01] PHP Fatal error: require_once() [<a href='function.require'>function.require</a>]: Failed opening required '/home/american/public_html/forum/admin/sources/base/ipsRegistry.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/home/american/public_html/forum/ips_kernel/') in /home/american/public_html/forum/index.php on line 23

From what it can be seen, your forum has a missing requirement, as seen in the above logs in the PHP Fatal Error part. As also you are using an old IPB version 3.3.4, we recommend to update it to the latest version available, as this will most probably also fix the errors that you are facing now. Please note that amount of processes that are unexplainable running may be a result of the malfunctioning of the IPB installation. Please update and let us know if you encounter any issues.

Too bad it's 12/29 and on a Saturday. I really was hoping to upgrade via the upgrade tool but it won't work....

Also,

The following file appears to have been exploited and/or uploaded maliciously, as it is tagged as a picture file (.jpg) but actually contains obfuscated PHP code:

/home/american/public_html/forum/uploads/profile/photo-5142.jpg

As such, I have chown'd the file to root and chmoded it to 000, in order to prevent it from being accessed. As soon as I did this I immediately noticed that the load on the server dropped appreciably:

root@server [/home/american/public_html/forum]# cat /proc/loadavg
1.36 4.59 7.47 1/159 18512

The best place to share these followups is in your ticket. We're investigating it for you, however as mentioned, it's a holiday weekend and we are on reduced staff right now. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks Collin, will do.