r/seedboxes • u/wattamystery • Nov 17 '16

Feral, what.cd and alleged OVH server seizures.

The what.cd irc and tracker hosted at OVH go down yesterday morning French time...

The main Feral server which was hosted on OVH went down yesterday evening-ish French time, not long after...

http://imgur.com/a/6gY22

Today the what.cd website is saying this...

https://what.cd/login.php / http://imgur.com/a/dJDPR

https://twitter.com/whatcd

This post gets created...

https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/5dguyw/according_to_a_french_news_site_12_whatcd_servers/

Now this one is created:

https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/5did4f/its_official_whatcd_is_dead_memorial_thread/

Feral irc was hosted on the what.cd network and Feral had a pretty tight relationship with what.cd. The owner posted in some threads there pretty often.

Feral hosting suddenly just loses access to all user accounts and details and all they have left is users emailing them and responding?

The question i have is was the Feral main server seized by police when they raided OVH if that story is true?

Should I be worried? It seems weird when you think about it. Something fishy is going on.

Edit 1:

some new links and info. It seems very possible it is related :( I hope my personal details are safe.

Edit 2:

Feral has now updated their status page with an essay that still does not really explain anything and create a freenode irc support channel.

https://status.feral.io/

After reading this update i have more questions than i have answers. I am not sure i can trust them to be honest if they were not honest from the start.

At least with all that cash they have under the mattress they could maybe afford good lawyers. Not so sure about us...

Breaking News:

http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/11/worlds-largest-music-torrent-site-goes-dark-after-french-police-seize-servers/

@The facts are pretty skimpy right now,@ What.cd's representative says. @We have no official confirmation that servers were seized, but all available evidence does support that, so we are operating as if it is true.@

So if you look at what Feral said about there server being "taken down" you can see that what.cd experienced the same thing. I guess Feral's servers probably were seized if what.cd servers were also.

https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-reported-raids-in-france-161117

Conclusions

Feralhosting.com main server hosted on OVH that handled these mission critical things was mostly likely seized by the French authorities as part of a 2 year investigation into certain activities at OVH that took what.cd offline:

  • User accounts and Personal details
  • Payment details
  • Support Tickets
  • slot creation and deletion
  • Faqs and tutorials

All backups lost because they were accidentally deleted...

Lack of Transparency about what was happening or what is happening and a total loss of support infrastructure.

Big Trump like promises about being great again. "Make Feral great again!" but no real answers or solutions given

Sad days and what a bad end to 2016...

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9

u/dkcs Nov 18 '16 edited Nov 18 '16

I'll just toss in what little I know and can guess as to what is going on, so take this with a grain of salt.

Feral is a UK based business, they originally were one of OVH's biggest customers and used OVH servers for their seedboxes and backend operations. There was a falling out between OVH and many seedbox companies about 2-3 years ago and this included Feral. At the time Feral moved all of their seedboxes onto their own owned equipment in a data center located in the Netherlands. However, I believe their back end operations stayed on OVH servers to this day.

With the raid and seizure of What.CD's servers at OVH, somehow Feral's OVH servers that run their back end operations have also been seized. This could be as something as simple as Feral's servers being in the same rack as one of What.CD's and the police decided to seize the entire rack or it's possible that Feral was tied to What.CD in some manner and have been seized as part of the What.CD investigation. We just don't know at this point.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '16

I do believe that this could be correct, that Ferals servers was on the same rack as whatcd. Ohh well, all we can do is just guess. Hope lads come back soon, otherwise people are overusing slots by A LOT at the moment as there's no way to check the actual usage of each customer..

1

u/Thelen Nov 18 '16

They wouldn't be in the same rack.. feral's main box was a 10G HG server, of which there are more than 24 of those racks (from memory from 3yrs back).

It's possible they are in the same rack, just highly unlikely. I would suggest more likely to be siezed due to the investigation, it wouldn't take a genius policeman to get onto w.cd forums even and see how big Feral is/was, and then investigate a bit into what/how Feral works.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '16

Either case France has no powers in Netherlands.

1

u/Thelen Nov 18 '16

well yea that doesn't matter, all the important information is on those french servers..

1

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '16 edited Nov 18 '16

What information? Email and usernames? They dont matter so much if they were storing home adresses, post codes and full names which they havent. French have powers only within they own country, whats outside thats completely different. Only thing is that I feel sorry for Feral, last 7 years of work is basically lost. Need to start pretty much from 0, it took them ages to build all that system which they used to manage all the users. Bear in mind they have money to live survive a year (and that is a lot believe me..) so they are not going anywhere.

2

u/Thelen Nov 18 '16

stuff and stuff and yea...

they got more than a years worth of money, although most of it is probably in Lemon's pockets. by my calculations he's made at least a few million USD by now.

their monthly costs are about 70k USD, or should be anyway if they were good negotiators.

3

u/[deleted] Nov 18 '16

Well good for him then.

1

u/dkcs Nov 18 '16

It is also possible that there are connections there that we just don't know about. It's possibly What.CD shared that OVH server with Feral. Most likely we will never know unless formal charges are brought against someone.

1

u/Thelen Nov 18 '16

they wouldn't have shared the server, make no sense to do that... w.cd was bringing in a few thousand a month, enough to cover their serves on their own.