Bitcoin Forum

I'm getting a 500:Internal Server Error when i try to go to my wallet/their site :( anybody know what up?

Damnit, I just put money on there to use tonight.

Same problem. I don't have much there, but it's still a bit worrying.

I'm taking a guess here:
Instawallet is run by the same guy as Bitcoinmonitor.com. Bitcoinmonitor doesn't show transactions in the network anymore all of a sudden, only Trades. I guess the server's Bitcoin-daemon crashed, which would cause the Bitcoinmonitor-Symptoms and also Instawallet throwing an error. No need to worry.

I think you solved it.

Yeah, sorry for the outage guys. Nick is right, bitcoind crashed on me for some reason. I will probably set up some sort of restart script to improve uptime, although ultimately these crashes shouldn't happen in the first place. Hopefully these sneaky bugs in the Bitcoin source code can be tracked down over time.

I appreciate both services, glad they're back up.

I accessed my Instawallet through Tor today, then realized that's probably a bad idea in general. Maybe I should create a new one?

That's no problem. Instawallet uses SSL, so all the Tor exit node sees is an encrypted connection to Instawallet. The exact URL you are accessing is also only sent in encrypted form.

I heard that some Tor exit nodes use 'SSL strip' to perform a man-in-the-middle-attack on your traffic (is this common?). But your browser should warn you, if the SSL certificate of the site doesn't match.

 
Jav, just so you know, I think Instawallet is great, and I just sent a donation to reinforce that. Keep it free, honest, and as easy to access as it is, and I'll keep recommending it to others, and recommending they donate periodically too.

You mean your server refuses HTTP even if the client "insists", right? I ask that because there are some malicious Tor exit nodes which try to switch the connection from HTTPS to HTTP. They wouldn't get the first URL parameter, but if you just generate another they would get this new one.

Thx, much appreciated!


That's right, Instawallet is only available over SSL.

Bitcoind shut down again last night. :-/ Sorry about that! But I think I'm onto the cause now and should be able to make some improvements.

i got every time " 504 Gateway Time-out "

is there anyone with more luck on that site ?

The site seems to be having issues, another thread regarding it http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=28980.0

Yes, I just noticed that the site was down for a number of hours. Sorry about that. It's back up again now. Unfortunately I'm not sure what caused the crash, so it might happen again. :-/

Downtime again? Any idea we'll you'll be back up? Thanks for this service by the way, it's really useful and (so far) dependable.

It's back up.. for the moment. You guys are putting too much load on it by using it so much. ;-)

Seriously though, I'm running into a number of scaling issues which show that the Bitcoin daemon hasn't really been used in production (large wallet.dat) much. I'm afraid there isn't an over-night fix for this, so the site might be flaky over the next days/weeks until I can figure out some solutions and/or workarounds.


Thx for the encouragement. I'm glad it's useful to some people. Sorry about the downtime. I hope I can return to the previous level of stability once this growing pain is sorted out.