Update: Turns out the fix we used didn't work. Podcasts are down again until further notice.
Hey All. After a pretty damn stressful 72 hours, GamerAndy.com is entirely back up and operational.
PG4 of XBstream has been in contact with me and apologized mightily for the issues his little program caused. For those of you just tuning in, I'm going to briefly recap the goings-ons:
Shortly after the show Thursday night, we noticed a bump in traffic, but it wasn't really that significant (we thought).
All of Friday, the site was running like ass, and by Friday night it had slowed to a crawl and started giving us strange error messages that prompted me to call our host.
Long story short, GamerAndy Live! had been included in the default RSS section of a new reader titled XBstream that hit the market last week with a lot of publicity. It lets you stream podcasts and RSS text feeds to your XBox 360).
However, because of a bug in the code the program made it so that everybody who turned on the program automatically downloaded the most recent 30 episodes of all the six preloaded podcasts, including GamerAndy Live!
We weren't the only ones hit by it, and it was pretty scary for a while as we burned through more than 600 gigs of our bandwidth before we figured out what was happening. The podcasts went down for the weekend as we struggled to regain control of our feed, and as of Monday we are completely operational again.
UPDATE: WE ARE NOT UP AGAIN AS OF MONDAY AFTERNOON. THE FIX DID NOT WORK AND WE BEGAN TO BE SLAMMED AGAIN WHEN WE PUT OUR PODCASTS BACK UP. SO, UNTIL WE FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET XBSTREAM v1.0 TO STOP WANGING US, WE PODCASTS WILL BE UNAVAILABLE EXCEPT BY DIRECT DOWNLOAD. SORRY.
I'd like to just take a moment here to thank PG4 for working to correct the damage his program did. With all the shit I talked through this whole event, I wasn't expecting him to be nearly as helpful as he has been.
Oh, and when it's patched, you should go download XBstream, where GA live will be a default (for ONE episode... not 30). The program is actually pretty nifty
-Andy
Good to know that it has been patched but I dont think i will be able to listen to your latest episode for a while.
That is good news, Andy. I had been looking forward to XB Stream for quite some time, after hearing about it a while ago. I would have gotten it last week had my Xbox 360 not busted, but once it's fixed it's good to know that I can get XB Stream without that bug.
I'm glad to hear everything has been worked out.
I knew something was up when it took 4 hours to download episode 56 on itunes
Would renaming the letest podcast and disabling the rss stop it from breaking and enable people to download it.
Andy,
I just sent you and PG4 an email explaining how to block XBStream from accessing specific files. Please let me know if you need any specific help, I'll be happy to lend a hand.
Curry @ Xboxic
Andy try sticking this into a .htaccess file:
SetEnvIf User-Agent "XB Stream" Denied=1
SetEnvIf User-Agent "XB Stream 1.1" Denied=1
Order allow,deny
Allow from env=!Denied
Deny from env=Denied
What that should do is deny the XB Stream client that will download automatically, and the one that the user can change; otherwise it will permit the download. If you modify your 403 access denied page to be an RSS XML file that will give the user a message saying they should download the latest version of XB Stream, and until they do they can't access the feed.
You could also accomplish this with a mod-rewrite:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^XB\ Stream
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^XB\ Stream \1.1
RewriteRule . xbdenied.xml
xbdenied.xml would be the RSS XML file with the message to download a new version of XB Stream.
KEEP IN MIND, that I don't have ready access to Apache right now, so if you're going to give that a try make sure you test it first or verify it is working if you deploy it without first testing. Especially around the first method using quotes in the .htaccess declaration.
If you don't know how to make a .htaccess file you may find this site helpful: http://www.htmlite.com/HTA003.php
Hope that helps.
we are still having issues over at xbl radio because of this. Our host doesn't want to turn us back on because of the current amount of failed attempts to our site, we have gotten something around a little over 2.5 million failed hits over the past few days while all this crap has went on. pg4 sounds like a nice guy, he hasn't got back with me but he sounds nice. But he still ws the person that fucked up everything over at xbl radio and has givin myself and rusty a major headache with all this crap
Hi Steve519, please email me at pg4@xbstream.com and I'll get back to you immediately. I have been in contact with CarpalTunnel and figured he notified you that we have been in contact.
Litheon, GamerAndy: If you want to redirect users you can redirect them to this XML file: http://www.xbstream.com/xbs/blocked.xml , that way you do not have to use more bandwidth. It basically tells them to download the new version.
Hi,
To block XB Stream Use this code below. I've tested it on a cpanel RedHat Linux machine running Apache:
Create, a file name it ".htaccess" (without the " characters) and upload it to the same directory your podcast wma/mp3 files are inside of. You will need to use ftp to do this since most blogging software cannot write .htaccess files correctly.
-------------------------------------------
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "XB Stream$" deny_bot=1
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=deny_bot
--------------------------------------------
The above code will block the first version of XB Stream which downloaded audio incorrectly. If you want to block all versions and future version of Xb Stream, remove the $ in the top line of code and it will block XB Stream completely.
This blog seems to block characters, here is the code again (this time correct):
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "XB Stream$" deny_bot=1
<Limit HEAD GET POST PUT>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=deny_bot
</Limit>
I just added this to our .htaccess:
# XBStream fix
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^XB\ Stream$
RewriteRule . http://www.xbstream.com/xbs/blocked.xml [R=permanent,L]
---
A check earlier today showed that 1 out of 8 XB Stream users accessing our site is using v1.1, and 1 out of 8 is using v1.2. That means 3 out of 4 are still "murdering" podcast sites. I'm hoping us sending the redirect too will get this fixed, and save me a lot of bandwidth too actually (it's really using ridiculous amount, even for us).
#gamerandy on irc.gamesurge.net
Port: 20609
Password: chapple
