[Solved] Cannot Access My Account On Stevie

[AFHeaton]

I have not been able to access my account (afheaton) on Stevie for nearly a week. I get no response from http://stevie.heliohost.org, though http://johnny.heliohost.org responds, and I can even log into the account which was deleted from Johnny when I moved my account to Stevie last October. I logged into cpanel on 25th January, so my account should not have been suspended, but, just in case, I tried to reactivate afheaton.heliohost.org, and the account was reported as not in the inactive list.

Likewise, I can ping www.heliohost.org and johnny.heliohost.org, but not stevie.heliohost.net. It is as though Stevie is down, though the status monitor shows it as being up throughout. Could it be a remnant of the recently logged nameserver problem? I see the following IPs: stevie.heliohost.org (65.19.143.2); johnny.heliohost.org (64.62.211.131); www.heliohost.org (64.62.211.132). Are these correct? If so, why does Stevie not respond?

Please help.

 

Account name: afheaton.heliohost.org

 

Thanks,

Antony F Heaton.

[Shinryuu]

Stevie's IP is 216.218.192.170. I'm not sure what's up, the DNS issue happened well over a month ago and shouldn't be affecting anyone anymore. Your site is showing up fine for me; maybe try contacting your ISP and ask them to check their DNS records or if they're blocking Stevie's IP for some reason.

[Krydos]

Your IP was blocked by Stevie on February 5th for 382 incoming FTP connections. Usually that large of number of FTP connections indicates a brute force attempt.

 

Your IP address has been unblocked, and you should now be able to log in and see your website. Let us know if you're still having problems connecting to services on Stevie.

 

That said, is this normal behaviour for your account? It's fine if it is; just let us know why you will be having so many FTP connections, whether your IP address changes often, and a rough estimate of how many FTP connections per day we can expect to see from your IP address and we can adjust the automated systems accordingly.

[AFHeaton]

Thanks for unblocking my account: it is now working normally again. I did not realise that I was causing traffic that was being seen as suspicious. The reason for the level of FTP accesses is that I have been using webcam movement detection and logging the captures via FTP. Unfortunately the D-Link webcams produce a needlessly high number of images for each movement detected. I have asked D-Link for the facility to limit the rate of image capture, and they have accepted this for a future firmware upgrade, but with no commitment to a release date.

If I presume that the problem is the number of log-ins, rather than the amount of traffic, then I may be able to buffer the captures locally and periodically perform a remote update, but this of course lowers the level of security that the cameras provide.

The webcams only occasionally detect movement, but can typically log 30 to 50 images each time. Normally there would have been only 5 to 10 such occurrences during the day, though I have seen up to 1500 captures in a day. I generally check and delete the images at least once per day, to stop the accumulation of large amounts of data.

My broadband connection is not completely reliable, being some distance from the telephone exchange, and every few days my router has to re-establish the connection, and this often results in a change of IP. I have not monitored this, though I think it normally stays within the same 255.255.255.0 subgroup.

For the present I am logging the webcam captures on a different host.

Thank you again for your assistance,

Antony F Heaton.

[Krydos]

Ok, your account has been whitelisted, so your IP address won't get blocked again for high FTP usage.

 

You can continue your automatic movement detection uploads as they were before if you would like. The reason I asked the additional questions was to make sure you had a legitimate reason to be using FTP so much, which you definitely do.

 

Our apologies for the service interruption you experienced, but there has been an increasing number of users complaining about being unable to connect to Stevie via FTP. In order to counter these errors and slow connections that many are experiencing we are attempting to deny access to the bots and hackers that are trying to gain illegal access to accounts hosted on our servers or just to cause us downtime for whatever reason, and unfortunately your account got caught up by our automated systems.

[AFHeaton]

That's very good. I only hope I shall not have renewed problems if my IP address changes as a result of my poor broadband connection.

Thank you very much for dealing with the matter so promptly,

Antony F Heaton.