Adblock Plus and (a little) more
adblockplus.org is now powered by a new CMS engine · 2015-05-19 18:07 by Wladimir Palant
Five years ago we started using Anwiki to power adblockplus.org. The most important reason was our need to support translations in a way that could scale for many languages and many translators. Sadly, Anwiki has a number of issues that make working with it unnecessarily hard. We couldn’t find any existing products that do a better job so we decided to roll our own.
Open sourcing our infrastructure · 2013-11-08 09:00 by Felix Dahlke
About a year ago, we began to seriously scale up our infrastructure, moving from one overworked server to currently 22, with 13 of these being dedicated filter download servers.
We started with one server with a dozen different functions, and a range of scripts that kept it all together. While this works well for a single server, it’s a bit hard to scale, so we moved to a configuration management tool, Puppet, which is also used by Mozilla, Wikimedia and many others.
Better SSL support on adblockplus.org · 2013-07-08 12:55 by Wladimir Palant
This website has been supporting SSL encryption for a while now. However, normally both HTTP and HTTPS access were allowed, with exception of some parts of the website. This was mainly because of the weak server powering that website. Now that this server is gone this could finally change: adblockplus.org is an HTTPS only website now — for better security and privacy.
Denial of service attack on adblockplus.org [Updated3] · 2013-06-28 01:10 by Wladimir Palant
The reason why our server was down for a day is a massive denial-of-service attack that started yesterday night German time. For historical reasons, our main website was running on a weak server (the weakest we have) and we already had issues with it in the past — we just didn’t have the time to migrate it to some more powerful hardware. In addition, the hosting company made matters worse by blocking our IP address without telling us in order to protect their network. They actually claimed that the IP wasn’t blocked when I asked about it explicitly. So we ended up wasting quite a bit of time unfortunately.
New adblockplus.org · 2013-01-10 16:31 by Felix Dahlke
As of now, the new adblockplus.org is finally online. These were some of our goals for the new website:
- More appealing, yet simple design
- Better navigation
- A decent mobile version
- Should work in any popular browser, including Internet Explorer 6
- Should work with JavaScript disabled
- A single landing page, not one for each platform
I believe we’ve managed all that, what do you think?
Read on if you’re interested in the technical side.
Sorry about the server outage · 2012-11-23 14:20 by Wladimir Palant
Following the Adblock Plus 2.2 release yesterday our server became pretty much unreachable. This was the result of the new typo correction feature downloading its database. Unfortunately, while I was very focused on ensuring that this feature has the necessary quality I entirely forgot what this one server request per user would mean for our old server which cannot really handle much load. A new server with much more resources is handling this now but that change still took a day to propagate. Sorry about that, again a lesson learned.
We are back · 2012-02-09 16:04 by Wladimir Palant
As you probably noticed, the distribution update yesterday didn’t go as planned. For some reason, the new operating system confused the virtual server manager enough that it refused to start the server again. And since that issue couldn’t be resolved on our side fixing it took a while. Now the system has been restored from backup, I then applied my personal backup (because the hosting provider could only restore an old backup for reasons I’m unable to understand) and now we are only missing a few days worth of issue reports and probably a few forum posts from yesterday’s morning (roughly one hour between my backup and the start of the downtime).
Possible downtime on Wednesday · 2012-02-07 09:55 by Wladimir Palant
I will try to update the Linux distribution on adblockplus.org tomorrow (Wednesday), starting at around 8 AM CET. With some luck the server will only go down for a few seconds for a reboot. Obviously, there is some risk of an extended downtime but I hope that this time the backups will allow restoring service soon if something goes wrong. easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org (filter list downloads) will not be affected but everything else on the adblockplus.org domain (including EasyList homepage) will be.
List of Adblock Plus/Chrome issues · 2011-01-25 11:32 by Wladimir Palant
I just created a known issues page for Adblock Plus/Chrome. So far I can think of three main issues that are being raised regularly and that we cannot do much about right now. Does anybody have more?
adblockplus.org back after a lengthy downtime [updated] · 2011-01-23 05:30 by Wladimir Palant
I just brought adblockplus.org back from the longest downtime in four years (around 30 hours). What happened is that I broke the server when trying to update the Linux distribution used. Now updating the distribution on a live server is a risky affair but the hosting provider has several protection layers in place so that I didn’t expect more than one hour downtime if things go badly.