Currently unable to access https://webthings.io/ .
Sorry I didn’t see your message sooner to let you know, but the DNS servers are back up.
I can get to the web site…
Hi Ben, i went to your “Help Welcome” link on Github to have a read and was wondering could this be a cause of concern? ie. the part that says-
“We think that the DNS servers are occasionally getting overwhelmed by traffic but we don’t know where it’s coming from, I suspect it isn’t WebThings users because there are lots of failed lookups for subdomains that don’t exist in the logs”
Or is this something that would be relatively benign?
I can’t comment on Pagekite security, but the service exposes a direct link into your home WebThing instance where the login screen is shown… If you have weak user account names and passwords then there into your WT front end. If were lucky WT supports a failed login backoff timer to slow down brute-force attempts. I’ve not evaluated WT 2FA yet which should be more secure.
Personally, I use Wireguard to access my home networks.
After initial configuration of WT it has worked reliably for multiple years and I rarely need to access the GUI.
Yes, it is a cause for concern because it keeps crashing the registration server!
It’s possible that people have been using our PageKite instance for use cases other than WebThings Gateway (apparently pagekite.net’s own instance suffers from a lot of misuse!), but I suspect it’s probably more likely that the traffic is just generated by a misconfigured web crawler somewhere.
I’ve been looking for help with mitigating this for quite a few months now, but so far nobody has come forward. I wish I had more time to investigate it myself because it’s very annoying.
Ultimately the tunnelling service is provided as a free service as a convenience for people. It’s great when it works, but I’m afraid I can’t make any guarantees regarding uptime.
Currently unavailable…
I am getting many “webthings.io” DNS lookup failures today (11/14/24). Some times the IP is returned, but often no response…
So much for Uptime Robot notifying me when it’s down!
Thanks for reporting, it’s back up now.
I’m going to upgrade the database servers soon which might help a bit.