Hi all,

Id like to know - is it just me, or is something really messed up with the e-on sites?

Yes it's a mess.  I've had trouble getting to both sites on and off for the last couple of days.  At the moment, Cornucopia won't load at all

Quote - Yes it's a mess.  I've had trouble getting to both sites on and off for the last couple of days.  At the moment, Cornucopia won't load at all

It answers the question - what do you get when you cross an ecosystem with a black hole? ;-)

Would that be anything to do with the 2nd law of thermodynamics ??

:b_confused:

They hired a new webmaster.  That's all I'm gonna say.

I've been trying to download a tutorial file I purchased from C3d since last Friday.  It's supposed to be huge but when I managed to finally download it, it was 0 kb (Firefox) or 118 kb (IE).  Now it's totally gone from my list of purchases.  I can just trust Christie is working on it.  I'm sure she's got her hands full.

400MB and larger are tough to download from C3D at times.  ChristieK emailed me separate links once that didn't go through C3D to get large files.

e-on site for me is bad, I have to refresh every page for it to load right, C3D was ok up until this morning, now I get a "can't find server error".

Quote - They hired a new webmaster.  That's all I'm gonna say.

Seems to me like they might have another new one soon...

This is what I get at both Cornucopia and e-on  this morning

Error 503 Service Unavailable

Service Unavailable

Guru Meditation:

XID: 586324311

Varnish cache server

yeah i cant get in the website  either, need  to send them my bank statment showing that i  payed for vue infinite 8.5 cuase they recon i havent  my copy is not leagal -WTF

-paid for it twice, first one was Rejected by their website, so i paid a second time and then got the download for it and such.

I was able to get the C3d Web site this morning without any problems, although my last purchase is still missing from my account.

That meditaiton guru-devil has haunted me a lot, in the past. Normally I use Firefox, but I tried Opera, and the error message has only popped up a few times with that. So, if I go to Cornucopia, I use Opera.

BTW. my Firefox updated itself a few days ago, and now a lot of webpages causes my connection to stall. This message is written from the Opera browser, runs smoothly.

• Just made a test, Cornucopia works for me (with Opera).

Hi Lars - ditto on the meditation-guru-fellow which, for me, usually comes up when I am downloading something.  I have just ignored the warning in the past and the download continues just fine (as is the case right now) and the message goes away by itself.

I am using Firefox.

I got the guru error when I tried to upload pictures, and it caused the upload to fail. Never have gotten anything when I download stuff.

Well, their domains haven't expired.  So that's a plus.

E-on's servers suffered from DOS attacks.  So they were turned off until the storm was over.  They should fire the webmaster that updated their sites recently.

Opera won't work on my pc and I can see no reason why.   Chrome is my default browser.  Firefox is very slow 

Its down again!  what on earth are they doing.

They were attacked the other day, maybe it's another attack.

seems like they are getting screwed over continously then, anyone know why/who?  or just some spotty teen having fun?

Still being attacked.

It appears that the last two versions of Vue have been pirated. I can see them freely available on two of the most heavily used pirate sites. I believe that e-on was attempting to have the pirated copies deleted from both Rapidshare and MegaUploads. Probably this has something to do with the current attack.

If it is an attack I just hope that personal details are safe!

A denial-of-service attack occurs when many computers (or computer processes) attempt to access a site all at once. The receiving web site servers attempt to respond by opening a page to each "computer" trying to read the site, but if the requests come too quickly and too fast, the receiving sever bogs down. It reaches a point where it cannot process any more requests to open pages.

So, this is not the same kind of "attack" as when someone hacks into a web site, reading files and stealing data. It is a much more simple kind of thing.

During the recent Wikileaks episode, eBay, Amazon and several banks refused to accept donations to the Wikileaks site. Some of the banks, and Amazon froze the accounts of Assange.

In return, a group of people going by the name of "Anonomous" made available to anyone, a small and very simple program that can create a denial-of-service attack. The program works by you, the user, typing in the web adress of the victim site, and then executing the program. The program sends several hundred requests to the target web site per minute. The "request" simply is a request to read the front page of the site.  That is, to "open" up a page. The intent of Anonomous was to get as many people as possible to try to bombard the web sites of eBay, Amazon and the named banks - to retaliate for those site freezing the accounts or refusing to accept donations for Wikileaks. This is a denial-of-service attack.

Problem is, now that little piece of program is now available to any stupid kid who wants to use it for any purpose. Almost anyone following the events of the Wikileaks mess knows about it and where to get it. It's still there for the downloading.

And, I say "stupid" since the IP address of the person using that little program to send the attack is written into every "request." How hard is it to capture one of the send requests, and trace back to the source? - Not hard at all, since every commercial server automatically captures the IP address of any incoming requests. Plus, now the request message itself carries the IP address. Plus, if you are a network tech, you probably are already using a software program that traces IP addresses to their physical location around the globe.

The most common way a denial-of-service attack is delt with is for the site managers to switch to a new set of IP addresses. But, you either have to have already obtained these for use in an emergency, or you have to purchase them. Sophisticated web sites, such as Amazon, have many server sets on line, and they can switch their files and programs to new IP addresses every minute - another way that DOS attacks are commonly thwarted. Also, the big sites have IP trace-hunter programs that automatically trace back every so many "open requests", and either bombard the originating IP in return, or do some other things I won't go into to kill the source of the DOS attack.

All this is expensive, and probably has not been necessary on the e-on web sites to this point. If e-on is forced to armor their web sites, we all are going to pay for it in the end - in terms of more expensive products, among other things.

Nice! Yes?

Pam, I just made a quick search for Vue xStream, and found some working links to dl Vue 9xSt. Guess you were right. Unless those links were already available.

Yes, Bruno.

I can see a bunch of them, too. But am not wanting to point that out or discuss it much. E-On is aware of most of them, I think.

Personally, I'd be willing to contribute $ to the approx $450 cost of the network  software for the E-On staff that can find the geographic location of page requests. Anyone else?

Among other things, it would be a fairly simple matter to compare the IP addys of the DOS attackers with the IP addys of all registered members of the E-On customer base. That would help to identify any attacker that was somehow a disgruntled customer.

I swear this DOS attack is going to end up raising the price of Vue and C3D items for all of us, in the end. Pisses me off, rather!

There was a page up on Cornucopia that they were doing maintenance which is gone now and now E-OnSoftware now has a page up like the other had. They should come on these other Boards and make a statement for customers or send out an e-mail.

I'm still getting message about maintenance, and to come back in a few hours on Cornucopia.

That would be the good story - that the staff is just doing maintenance and has run into something that has taken a little longer than expected.

The pirated download links for Vue were there the day after Vue 9's release.  Such things can not be prevented.  Happens to all software.

I agree totally with Blaineak's earlier comment - e-onsoftware should make a public statement so that it's clients are fully informed.

This is all the more important as there seem to be two seperate issues being raised here - a DOS attack and pirated download links.  Excuse my ignorance but they don't seem to be at all related - so nobody (clients) other than staff at e-onsoftware and Cornupcopia 3D really knows what the problem is.  On that basis I'm still concerned that the personal details of clients might be compromised and would at least expect some statement by those businesses with some guarantees.

Combating the pirated software is an excercise in futility, ask Adobe and MicroSoft. Also e-on and Cornucopia need to get their act together...this is way too long to be down even with the heaviest DOS attack. BTW those mentioning tracing it are  chasing the dragons tail, they are almost always performed with zombie computers...could be yours.

Well, we don't know for sure what happened, maybe it's bigger than we think. And they are probably very busy getting things back to normal. I'm sure if clients details had been disclosed, they would've said it, they posted on their Facebook page that the site was down for maintenance 2 hours ago, without more details. I'm sure they would've found a way to let us know our details were jeopardized.

Bruno is correct.

I just performed a network traffice trace on their IP addresses between 0600 and 0715 MST. They are receiving a lot of page requests, but not enough to suggest a DOS attack at all. Looks like an ordinary (semi-heavy) traffic load. Could be all the above is wild speculation (including my earlier posts), that they are indeed down for maintenance, but ran into some unexpected delays in bringing the system back up online.

Normally, if the customer data files have been compromised by an intruder, the company involved sends personal e-mails to everyone on its client lists. Since no such thing has been sent out, and since e-on easily has that capability, we've seen it many times, it seems unlikely that dww25 has anything to be concerned about.

I've been getting 404 errors for two days now...

Pirated downloads of software are made available without hacking into computer servers.  So that is a whole other non-related issue to E-on's servers being down.

I hope they let us know what happened soon.  I'm starting to get really unamused.  DoS or not, this is taking awhile, and I can't do any further pictures because of their whole Authenticate thing ><

They updated their store sites recently.  Then their Cornucopia3D front page.  That's when the troubles started.  They now have pushed their updated e-on site anyway to match their latest ads run in 3DWorld.  So even though they have webserver (and/or DNS firewall) issues, they are still sticking to their release times for site updates.  I doubt credit card info was stolen.  I use paypal which is encrypted anyway.  I'm sure e-on's is too when they do e-sales.

It could have been a simple virus that just brings down systems before they are patched.

Still nothing. I need to be proactive and check with my credit cards since no news is bad news. Really odd they are not reaching out to customers on a board somewhere?

If their email server database file is on the system that they either can't bring online yet or can't upgrade to work with their new server software yet, then they don't have a method to email everyone.

In theory they could copy the email database to a whole other PC somewhere and set it up as an email server blah blah so they could mass-mail us about something they don't fully know all the deals of anyway.  But by the time they got that PC to work, they could have been working on the actual email server (and the other servers that need to be brought back online first).

If they simply fried (or flashed wrong) a Cisco router while all this was going on (I've seen this a lot), that would be very easy to replace if they have the configuration for it somewhere.

Why can't they just post on their website why, or let other big names in the community (CGSociety, Renderosity, etc.) know?  I mean, its not like finding a site that is interested in the news is so hard to come by.

Yeah, I'm kind of miffed because I set aside a weekend to get the hang of Vue, and that's blown to bits with no posted explanation why.

The did post what happened on their site.  But then their site went offline.  What companies have told the world (the news) that their site is down and why it went down?

I think that it is just some mess done by new software (remember the supreme law of system administration: if it ain't broken, don't fix it!!!!!!!!). DDOS is unlikely (who cares about e-on?).

About pirated software: if you check warez sites you find anything within days of availabilty (and with anything mean the big, 4-digit price tags boys). Programs like Vue come with activation key generator which (they say) should generate correct codes. I have not tried anything of that kind, not even out of curiosity, because I am too scared of killing my Vue 9 Infinite legitimate (and un-legitimally fragile...) installation/activation.

An amusing side of those sites is that you see listed 3DStudio and Wings3D together, as if they were both commerical applications. I think that the population going to those sites are mainly collectors of software (get it, install it, have a look at it and then forget it, jumping to next shiny new toy). Professionals need support and can write off costs in their accounting, hobby users have a truckload of free or economical stuff to choose from. If you want to check if you like a program, watch video tutorials and get demos. If you collect stamps, why wouldn't you collect programs?

E=On and C3D   ARE    experiencing a denial-of-service attack.  This is confirmed.

Anyone else who has traffic analysis software, or who can locate and download the same can confirm this.

That surprises me, why would anyone want to do that to e-on? I can understand it with bigger Companies and Government type stuff that someone wants to attack, I don't understand why anyone would want to do that to a 3D software house, unless it's maybe a competitor.

Can you shed any light on where or who it might be coming from, are you "in the know" somehow?

I've just re-installed my old traffic analysis software, and I can see it happening in real time.

It is 0346 here MST, just poking around because I can't sleep, and thought of something to do. Don't know anything else - sorry.

My best guess  as to the reason why was stated earlier. The software to mount a DOS attack is now widely available. I'm guessing it is just some disgruntled immature person. You can see one or two like this around here, so not such a rare thing.

Software competitors generally have better things to do, so I'd guess that is a remote possibility. Some jerk is more likely.

Right, thanks for the info anyway, appreciated..

Good job I don't need anything from there at the moment..LOL

You're welcome.  Let's hope Injustice will be avenged.

The site now says the following

One of our servers was fried during the DOS attack and the data base was corrupted. We're having to restore everything manually, and it is taking time. Sorry for the interruption - we hope to be back online shortly.

I guess now we know.

Hey, was about to post the same thing, Rich!