Barracuda WAF issue affecting Plesk Hosting

Several sites hosted off of web-plesk53 were unreachable due to issues with the WAF (web application firewall) including:

-Housing.gatech.edu, textbooks.math.gatech.edu,
-undergradresearch.gatech.edu,
-faset.gatech.edu,
-transitionprograms.gatech.edu,
-policylibrary.gatech.edu,
-policies.gatech.edu,
-alan.ece.gatech.edu
-gtcad.gatech.edu
-hasler.ece.gatech.edu

Service is currently restored and support is monitoring the situation.

Related to the previous issue, web-plesk53 is now serving incorrect SSL certificates to sites hosted on the server. Support is working to resolve the issue.

Service is currently restored and support is monitoring the situation. If you are continuing to experience issues, or if you have questions or concerns, please file a ticket via services.gatech.edu or contact the Administrative Services Center at 404/385-1111.

Several sites hosted on the webplesk are unreachable due to issues with the WAF (web application firewall) including but limited to :

canvas.gatech.edu
crc.gatech.edu
ctl.gatech.edu
dining.gatech.edu
diversity,gatech.edu
housing.gatech.edu
ipat.gatech.edu

Several sites hosted on the webplesk are unreachable due to issues with the WAF (web application firewall) including but not limited to :

buzzport.gatech.edu
canvas.gatech.edu
crc.gatech.edu
ctl.gatech.edu
dining.gatech.edu
diversity,gatech.edu
housing.gatech.edu
ipat.gatech.edu

Staff are continuing to investigate with the vendor to resolve this issue.

Staff have discovered a communications issue between the Plesk hosts and the WAF (web application firewall) that is causing sites hosted on Plesk to be slow or unreachable. Staff are continuing to work with the vendor to resolve this issue.

Sites affected include but are not limited to:
buzzport.gatech.edu
canvas.gatech.edu
crc.gatech.edu
ctl.gatech.edu
dining.gatech.edu
diversity.gatech.edu
finance.gatech.edu
honors.gatech.edu
hosting.gatech.edu
housing.gatech.edu
ipat.gatech.edu

The vendor is applying a patch to address the communications issues with the Web Application Firewall.
Efforts are being made to prevent any downtime, but it is possible that there may be a brief outage of up to 10 minutes.

The vendor's patch was unsuccessful in resolving the issue and will rollback their patch. Efforts are being made to prevent any downtime, but it is possible that there may be a brief outage of up to 10 minutes. Support is continuing to work with the vendor to troubleshoot the problem.

Staff are still working with the vendor to resolve the WAF issue. If students need to access Canvas, they can reach it by going to https://gatech.instructure.com/

Support is continuing to work with the vendor to try and fix the issue with the WAF. However, network team is currently getting ready to implement a workaround to restore connectivity to the affected sites as a temporary measure until a fix for the WAF issue can be found. Once the workaround is implemented, approximately 30 minutes of down time on the hosted sites is expected.

The workaround was successful, and sites should be accessible once again. Support is continuing to work with the vendor to address the underlying issue for a more permanent fix.

The workaround that was put in to restore connectivity to plesk hosted websites continues to be working. However, a permanent solution to the underlying causing is still being investigated and worked on with the vendor. Once a working solution is found, tested, and implemented, this issue will be cleared . Until then, we will continue to run off the workaround, and support is continuously monitoring the situation for any new issues that could spring up from the workaround.

While the workaround to address the WAF issue on the the Plesk Webhosting complex on 4/5 did restore service, it unfortunately also is causing an IP forwarding issue which is affecting the functionality of some of the sites. Support is continuing to work with the vendor to restore the WAF to service so that the webhosting complex can be brought back to its original state.

OIT is continuing to monitor the situation, and there have been no significant updates yet. Support teams are still working with the vendor to get a more permanent fix to the issue.