FurrTrax

FurrTrax is a social networking and collaboration site to help members of the furry fandom organize, plan events, make friends, find other furries in their local areas, and those with similar interests.

The site is also accessible on smartphones and tablets via its own mobile portal and a dedicated Android app.

Fundraising for Jenn Service Dog
FurrTrax has donated advertising space to the Charity for Jenn, to raise money for a service dog to assist her with her epilepsy and seizure conditions. As of January 2017, she has her service dog, as her funding needs were met.

Web Hosting
FurrTrax also offers free web hosting to furries wishing to host their own small sites, projects, and art pages and even includes free CloudFlare Pro protection to any who opt to use a subdomain provided by FurrTrax. There is also a paid option with more features.

FurrTrax also offered free web hosting to Furry Social Networking Site Furnation in hopes to help the site stay online, but the offer was politely declined by SYSTEM of Furnation and it was decided that they would not continue to run the site.

Arizona Cyber Warfare Range
FurrTrax is also a supporter of the Arizona Cyber Warfare Range (http://www.azcwr.org). The AZCWR is a group of cyber warfare researchers, technicians, network engineers, and volunteers who assist each other in training, research, development, and live fire practice of attack and defense scenarios to become better prepared for real world job opportunities and real world situations.

Internet Services Provider
FurrTrax offers free Web & E-Mail hosting for Furrys who would like to host their own page, or small website and includes Free CloudFlare Website Protection as long as you opt to use a subdomain of FurrTrax.com. For a small fee they offer enhanced features, more storage space, and Database Access.

History
For a long time the furry community had been very scattered, and attempts by similar projects such as YiFFr, while good intentioned, failed due to lack of maintenance, upkeep, etc.

When the strongest of the remaining projects (YiFFr) went down permanently, it became clear another option was necessary and fast. Two weeks after the failure of YiFFr, the very first core program and associated MySQL backend for the FurrTrax project were born. First starting out as a mobile website only, which still exists today. With the second revision of the core program and database schema chatrooms were added, customizable user profile pages were added, and a bunch of minor XSS and MySQL injection flaws were fixed up with the help of several members for security testing efforts.

Three weeks after the failure of YiFFr, the alpha version of the FurrTrax android app was released, which was little more then a browser launcher that opened the Mobile site. At the second month of operations, a more functional app version was released which while still relying on the mobile website, was not a launcher. It was in of itself a separate browser program just for FurrTrax. The app also was given the ability to submit GPS location data to determine the distance between the site's users, and helping members locate nearby potential friends.


 * June 11, 2013 - FurrTrax was hit with its first internet based attack originating from Japan, from several IP Ranges. The IP Ranges were soon traced back to Trend Micro's Japanese datacenter. While the exact intent for the attack remains a mystery, they were attempting to access the chat log files stored in a secondary directory which was protected from outside access. This however did not stop them from continuing to try to guess URLs inside the folder for a number of hours until DarkXander was able to find a working telephone number for the Japanese branch of Trend Micro and question them why they were attempting to gain access to a protected section of the FurrTrax server.  After a threat of legal action by DarkXander(owner), Trend Micro Japan confirmed their servers were the source of the attack, but claimed no knowledge of why it was happening, and hinted it was probably some sort of malfunction.  It has now come to light that these unauthorized access attempts were a security test being conducted by Trend Micro without authorization of FurrTrax, for their SiteSafety Product
 * June 20, 2013 - FurrTrax.com was launched with 75% of the working functionality of the mobile app, but missing a main site logo. This made the service usable from both mobile devices and standard computers.
 * July 17, 2013 -FurrTrax steadily keeps increasing its user base, caping at 2000 members in a month and a half. By then it became increasingly clear that the systems own popularity may eventually lead to a overload on the server, to combat this, all MySQL transactions were optimized and streamlined and many queries were combined to save CPU cycles. At the same time another round of security testing was carried out,y and many small and medium sized vulnerabilities in the system were corrected.
 * August 17, 2013 - Datacenter upgrades were completed for the FurrTrax server, including a massive increase in bandwidth to support higher membership levels, the following is a speedtest.net result taken from the actual FurrTrax server from inside the datacenter.
 * September 12, 2013 - FurrTrax had its first unplanned downtime when the emergency system shutdown was tripped due to a cooling system failure. All systems shut down before any heat problems could occur, and all systems came back up about an hour later once the faulty cooling system in the rack was replaced.
 * May 20, 2014 - FurrTrax hits 7777 Members in early morning hours.
 * October 15, 2014 - FurrTrax Security recently compromised resulting in the flooding of chatrooms with random posts by unknown assailant, No data was stolen but chatrooms were mildly defaced. A independent security audit Conducted by Beyond Security found some underlying Security Flaws .  All medium and high level security flaws were fixed by the end of the same day by DarkXander .  FurrTrax Security is now tested frequently to ensure safe use for all members.
 * October 16, 2014 - Members can now create Member Group pages somewhat simular to Facebook to discuss and promote their topics of interest and promote discussion of such.
 * October 24, 2014 - To better protect the site from DDoS and other attacks FurrTrax has adopted CloudFlare Pro Site Protection.
 * November 19, 2014 - FurrTrax has 10,000 Members, We would like to thank our members for their continued support, and for helping us become one of the fastest growing furry sites.
 * November 30, 2014 - FurrTrax adds basic video chat capabilities to see how much interest there is in it.
 * December 03, 2014 - FurrTrax was down for a short time, but is back on on its backup server, outage was caused by an SSD Disk Failure, All Data was backed up and is safe.
 * March 27, 2015 - FurrTrax opens staff nominations to the membership for the first time giving our members a voice.
 * Apr 02, 2015 - FurrTrax offers Donator Perks to anyone who donates to the charity for Jenns Service Dog to give back to the community.
 * May 14, 2015 - FurrTrax has discontinued the use of the old PHPBB based forums and released our own integrated forums.
 * June 29, 2015 - In a further effort to increase site security and functionality, FurrTrax now offers our own bug bounty program.
 * July 20, 2015 - DarkXander has been layed off as part of his companies restructuring after being purchased by Alaskan Investors.
 * August 31, 2015 - FurrTrax Server is upgraded from the old quad core to its new eight core processor, and from its old 16GB of RAM to 28GB of RAM, as well as VMware and Firewall Upgrades.
 * September 17, 2015 - FurrTrax has added an extra level of encryption to protect users authentication information on the site.
 * October 08, 2015 - FurrTrax Hits 14,000 Members, We would like to thank our members for their continued support, and for helping us become one of the fastest growing furry sites.
 * October 23, 2015 - FurrTrax switches to requiring SSL Only mode for all users, We are all a little safer for it.
 * December 11, 2015 - FurrTrax upgrades today to their new Dual Xeon I7 quad core, Dell PowerEDGE R710, with 96 GB of RAM, Codenamed Spartan.
 * December 24, 2015 - FurrTrax has achieved membership of 15,000 users on Christmas Eve 2015.
 * February 19, 2016 - FurrTrax now has 144GB of RAM.
 * March 04, 2016 - FurrTrax now has Instant Messaging Capabilities.
 * April 09, 2016 - FurrTrax hits 16,000 Members.
 * May 11, 2016 - FurrTrax Virtual OpenSim World goes online.
 * June 07, 2016 - FurrTrax hit with 12 TB DDoS Attack and survives.
 * June 17, 2016 - FurrTrax and FurNation agree to end hostilities and make peace and collaboration agreement.
 * June 23, 2016 - FurrTrax now supports IPv6 fully.
 * June 26, 2016 - FurrTrax partners with FurGather to collaborate on future projects.

Hardware
The upcoming FurrTrax Server codenamed Spartan 2.0, a Google Search Appliance G100 Branded Dell PowerEDGE R720XD XL DataBase Engine Dual Socket Hex Core System with dual Intel Core I7 Series Xeon Hex Core Processors, 192GB of RAM, 22 x Solid State Drive's, and 4 x 1TB SAS Drives in RAID 10, retrofitted and Setup by DarkXander. The new server was aquired at a cost of $670(Excluding SSDs) of which $100 was provided by members donations, and features newer remote management systems as well.

The current FurrTrax Server codenamed Spartan, a Dell PowerEDGE R710 Dual Socket Hex Core System with dual Intel Core I7 Series Xeon Hex Core Processors, 144GB of RAM, and a 2.3TB total Solid State Drive storage system, retrofitted and Setup by DarkXander. The server was aquired at a cost of $690 of which $280 was provided by members donations, features a builtin remote management system, and improves reliability with its redundant cooling systems, redundant Power Supplies, and redundant network connections. Spartan weighs in roughly five times heavier than X-620, the old FurrTrax Server. Spartan will be decommissioned in late January of 2018 as its successor Spartan 2.0 is finished and takes its place.

The Original FurrTrax Server, internally known as X-620(VMware Hostname), was retired on December 11th, 2015 and the new server known as Spartan took over all of its former operations as the Main FurrTrax Server. X-620 was a custom built 2U size Rackmount server, equipped with a military spec motherboard, an AMD Eight-Core Phenom II CPU, and 28 GB of DDR3 RAM, an array of Solid State Storage, and a 400w non-redundant power supply, on VMware vSphere and Linux using PHP, Java, and MySQL. All PHP programming was written from scratch in Linux G-Edit.

FurrTrax was originally Stored on a 2TB RAID System but the system began to encounter frequent errors, and traffic was approaching the limit of the systems I/O speed, so the FurrTrax server was upgraded to All Solid State Drives for their higher reliability and greater I/O Speed Capacity.

FurrTrax does not use or rely on any third party frameworks, CMS systems, or libraries. As all the code was written from scratch, and not publicly released, It provided a added layer of security since no one other then DarkXander knows how the Programming and MySQL systems truly function. The servers are hosted in a PhoenixNAP Datacenter in Phoenix, Arizona.

SpeedTest
Speedtest done January 13th, 2016 from onboard Spartan. http://www.speedtest.net/result/4995438405.png

TraxWall Intrusion Defense System
FurrTrax has an extensive history of being the target of cyber attacks     from those who do not like the furry fandom, and others who seek to control the immense server power behind FurrTrax. To combat this, DarkXander developed a purpose built Layer 7 Intrusion Defense System which is autonomous, and built right into the source code of the site, and directly interfaces with the PFSense Firewall and CloudFlare Defenses. The system can detect, and instantly mitigate SQL injection, XSS, Binary Injection, Upload attacks, and even DDoS. TraxWall as it was named later by DarkXander, includes a full logging and alerting system, combined with powerfull automatic cross-referencing to identify the sources of attacks, zero in on if the attacker is a member of the site, and even use cookies, useragents, and device ids, to correlate and track attackers, even when they use or change proxys. This system and the site itself has been extensively pen-tested both by authorized personnel as well as hackers who have attempted to breach the site on a weekly, and sometimes daily basis. An ongoing challenge stands at the Arizona Cyber Warfare Range for anyone who can breach, or exploit the FurrTrax Site and Systems, will get direct honors and credit for their findings, and potentially a small cash reward.

As of Dec 20th, 2017, the challenge for members of the AZCWR to breach FurrTrax remains un-defeated. Noone has been able to breach the system.