Mickeyduck's machines

[mickeyduck]

Hey Michael I don't see a way to upload images to the forum? Only link to them hosted elsewhere? Drag n drop don't seem to work...

[Benckj]

It seems to be under control now.

As you indicated the forum , club and life in general is not what it use to be. Still have decent roads to drive down here but it is getting more crowded and difficult to find good ‘spots’ to go. My MR2 doesn’t venture out very often and is progressively getting harder to keep maintained & road worthy. Shame really as it’s still a buzz to drive.

Ashes to ashes,
Dust to dust.
If you don’t keep driving,
It will turn to rust.

[mknz]

Sadly Jim I guess that's what you get, if the thing won't even load a page.

If the forum no longer works reliably and it's because as Michael says the settings for SQL connections can't be dialled up due to a lack of RAM and it's running on the cusp of what the hardware will allow... in my experience (as an IT systems architect and engineer) that suggests the current club management don't adequately value the resource the forum offers to MR2 owners, or the fact that the club and its forum was founded to help MR2 owners keep their cars going so they could have fun in them and thereby keep the club going too.

Hence when I handed the forum over to the care of others I retained a backup of the thing as was at the time.

I very much appreciate Michael's caring for the forum as best he can but I suspect the financial resource required to keep it in a useful state is no longer allocated by the club's policy makers.

Often as not it's been taking me 10 or more page refreshes just to get each page to load.

Occasionally I get a Cloudflare page saying all is well except for the club's site which is down.

New memberships fell from what to what last year...? Hmmm.
P.S. Michael if you are running this on an EC2 maybe add a decent sized swap file to work around the RAM limitation and prevent the OS OOM beastie from killing MySQL, if you've not done so already? Works well on my Ubuntu EC2s on AWS...

And this forum has been working really well for wee patches of time too mate. Maybe you need to set up an auto-ban mechanism to get them bots under control or something? My EC2s use NGINX logs to trigger a bash script of mine to shut out bots etc via UFW if they have been a PITA. My script wouldn't necessarily suit your system but the idea works a treat for us.

The bots are generally for training AI datasets, this is a recent phenomena. Prior it was Bytedance/Tiktok, but I got that under control, they play a little dirty, but they're not too creative. Unlike search engine robots which have a vested interest and a high level of investment in their crawlers, AI dataset companies are far more varied, don't care if the site crashes because they only care about amount of data they can scrape per second, and host all over the world. They also make it deliberately harder to detect because things have been escalating in a cat'n'mouse game. The aggressiveness of the scrapers exceeds the bank account balance of the club, they will literally ramp up until they get 500s, 429s, etc.

It's only been this bad in the last few weeks, give us a little more time before we have to get more drastic. There's other things we can do like requiring being signed in to view the forum, disabling search, etc. Obviously undesirable for our club's goal, hence let's first exhaust the remaining options with controlling the bot traffic.

Cloudflare + a bit of scripting + blanket banning of certain regions has done quite a bit, because of that, right before the most recent wave of bot activity the forum page load performance and availability was the best it ever was. It's also running on even better hardware than in it did on Rackspace, a performant PHP interpreter, being moved to Sydney (closer to NZ), and more effective caching.

Swap is not the answer here, the bots will push it to the point where it's just timing out and it will be under so much thrashing it's not even possible to SSH in.

Sign-ups were up during COVID IIRC and then dropped again as inflation hit. International visitors have been consistent through-out, but more and more people sign up to the club without even realising a forum exists, they're joining our FB groups. I don't like that FB, Discord, Snapchat aren't searchable either, but it's where people are and have been primarily for the last decade. All of my friends, except literally one, that are in to cars or motorcycles (not just MR2s) are under 30 and don't use forums.

I haven't lived in Auckland for 5 years, so I'm the wrong person to be organising runs, it's not that I'm opposed to it. There's a variety of reasons and discussion that's been had as to getting the events going again in Auckland, I won't bring it up again here. Best thing anyone can do is organise something in the FB group.

Is it always like this or have I simply popped in at a bad time?

Bit of a bad time last few weeks.

Statistically most folk give up and leave a site after a few seconds if it fails to respond.
They sure don't try refreshing the page for several minutes...
And they don't tend to come back.

Still get the same number of international human sign-up requests as we did in 2019. This is generally true though.

Hey Michael I don't see a way to upload images to the forum? Only link to them hosted elsewhere? Drag n drop don't seem to work...

This definitely still works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox on Windows and Linux. Just drag'n'drop straight into the editor. If you can take a screen recording and provide some details I can look into it. Of course, first try disabling extensions.

[mickeyduck]

Thanks for the reply Michael, very informative.

Drag-drop works fine from this machine, not from my older one so don't worry about that, all good.

If the AI bots are so aggressive, could you write a script that sussed out the number of hits from a given IP address within a certain time period and then auto-banned it for 24 hours or something? Basically the kind of approach I took for our stuff at work. Works for us...

Jim - when I look back at all the time and effort I've put into my SW over the years, the last thing I want to do is sell it.

And obviously there's no way anything will ever replace it once it's gone.

But yeah all the roads around Auckland that were 100kmh are now 60kmh and you need to get at least 100km out of town now to really enjoy a decent back road. And my back really can't handle working on cars anymore. Leaning over the SW is the worst thing out as it's a lot further to lean to get to anything what with a boot at the back and wide feet at the sides. We'll see whether my very strong desire to keep the thing in the belief that I've pretty-much ironed out all the bugs over all these years and countless hours, wins out... or if my back proves just too darn naffed and I have no choice but to call it a day.

Even the GT86 gives me a sore neck thanks to an old whip-lash crash injury and Auckland's bumpy crater infested roads. But it does serve as my daily and while no quicker than an AW11 SC (except that it has no 180kmh speed cut) it is just as much fun through twisty back roads. And with almost 100,000km on the clock, still seems totally reliable.

One thing I'd like to do is fit Old Man Emu suspension and a supercharger to the Jimny cos its weight and wheel-base are just like an AW and it would be epic fun on a twisty backroad, just as quick as an AW11 SC as well as seriously capable off road.

Hey it's all a question of time and money (mostly money) though eh. As always.

Next trick will be posting pics - and what I can remember - from what little I've pulled off the SW so far in order to extract that clutch. After that I'll start to wade into it again.

I really do hope the forum is up to it as I totally must capture what I do as I do it, else I'll never remember exactly which bits go where when reassembling things later. If it turns out just way too painful to post here, I may need to simply document it all in my at-home copy. And perhaps transpose it all later.

Happy New Year everyone! Here's to a better 2024.

Must fit this one day too...

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DSCF4537.JPG (421.54 KiB) Viewed 226 times

[mickeyduck]

Just updated my earlier post about Dennis Aase's record-breaking SW.

Found some slightly more complete info and more pics, courtesy of Bill Strong's MR2OC posts.

Seems a number of old threads have died along with the car's driver and owner Dennis Aase who recently passed away. Pages dedicated to the car, its build and photos, have mostly vanished. Thankfully MR2OC still have some info if you dig around (thanks Bill...!)

As far as I can tell (at this stage) the car may have set the speed record using its standard gearbox though we do know Aase had a taller 5th gear made for the follow-up attempt at 240mph - which never happened due to bad weather. It seems possible the car was however using a Fensport dog-box but I've yet to find any definitive info regards this possibility.

However you look at it, an SW with about the same power as mine (slightly less actually) set a land speed record for its class (2 litre production blown GT) at an average speed of 211 mph = 339kmh. Amongst other things this suggests the aero of an SW is right up there with the best of them.

Anyone finds any further info regards this, feel free to post it here on my Rides thread with links to live pages. I've admired this MR2 and its owner's achievement since learning of it some years ago. Cheers.

[85AW20v]

.... And my back really can't handle working on cars anymore. Leaning over the SW is the worst thing out as it's a lot further to lean to get to anything what with a boot at the back and wide feet at the sides. We'll see whether my very strong desire to keep the thing in the belief that I've pretty-much ironed out all the bugs over all these years and countless hours, wins out... or if my back proves just too darn naffed and I have no choice but to call it a day. ......

Isn't this the exact reason you have sons who you introduced to MR2's Charlie?? Make it an Easter project for them with you supervising and providing the required lubrication!!

Oh and I sold my AW about 9 months ago. I worked out I'd had the thing for just over 23 years . It's gone to a local family who bought it for their son who has just turned 12 and so can take part in motorsport events. It'll be a great car for him to learn in and when his Dad has problems with his own car, he knows he's got another very reliable Toyota sitting on the trailer he can use....

I haven't given up motorsport though. As I tried to get you to do, I enter the Targa Tour events and bought a 2006 BMW 130i MSport for that. It's great fun, especially with the 3.0l straight six driving to the rear wheels and revving to 7500rpm!! Next event is a rally sprint at Te Kauwhata on 18 February using roads on either side of SH1. My wife is going to sit in the co-drivers seat for this one, so that'll be a new experience for both of us!!

Apart from your back, I hope all is well with you Charlie and life is ticking along OK. It's all good here.

Cheers
Simon