March 2009 Archives

I started tracking error messages on one of my production sites over the weekend, wherein I get notified whenever there’s an error, rather than it just going into a log that I’ll probably never read unless someone brings it up.

It’s a good practice — usually the errors are due to little bugs that I can fix before the person has finished reading the (customized) error page letting them know that the bug is my fault and that I’ve been notified. They hit reload, everything works, and everyone’s happy.

404s are errors, too, though they’re not always my fault, so I have a different error page for those. Sometimes they are, and I can usually fix them just as quickly. Sometimes they’re the result of people mistyping links into their own sites, and I can notify them about that, or write a redirect.

And sometimes I get insight into the latest scams, viruses, and bots that are running around in the wild. Today’s the latter. I just got quite a few notifications, all at once, from a couple dozen different IP addresses (i.e. zombies), from someone who’s apparently trying to put comment spam on one of my sites. It’s fun to watch, as it’s not going to work, for three reasons:

1. There’s a captcha as a simple deterrent (which works surprisingly well, all told, though it’s not perfect).

2. There’s a moderation system — posts don’t show up until they get approved.

3. Even beyond the above two, which have eliminated all spam to date, the reason I’m absolutely 100% confident that this spammer isn’t going to be successful is because the page that all the zombie bots are trying to access doesn’t exist any more.

Kevin does nearly all of the proofreading now (nearly all = I proof roughly one letter a month), so there has been a definite shortage of quotable PLS Observations here lately.

However, we just got a file that opens on my computer and not his, so I got to witness this one:

[So and so] is a large animal vet.

Nicely ambiguous. I added a hyphen.

I am a quaint old innkeeper; I keep this quaint old inn.
— Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice.

When making changes to your network layout, be sure to update the monitoring program as well (e.g. Nagios). If you don’t, and the IPs are different enough, and you wait a while before updating the mail server on the monitoring server…

Well, let’s just say that the queued up E-Mails are still coming in half an hour later, and it’s only for the last three days of “trouble” notifications, though thankfully it’s down to a rate of about one E-Mail per second due to throttling.

I just got a call from a telemarketer claiming to specialize in corporate acquisitions, who said (in what I’m guessing was a recording) that her company has a buyer who’s potentially interested in acquiring my company.

That’s new. Most telemarketers want me to buy imprinted pens or credit card terminals. This one gets bonus points for creativity.

They got the direction wrong, though. I’m much more interested in acquiring a similar company than I am in selling mine. Global economic disaster or not, I’m still enjoying the work, and it’s still paying the bills.

Ever since before we bought our new house a couple of months ago, it was looking like the road leading up to it was going to be one of the more… let’s say interesting aspects of home ownership in this particular location. Parts of it are quite steep, including a fairly sharp kink, and it becomes a dirt road partway through.

It’s better than some of the other roads or driveways we were considering, though, and it ended up not being a deal-breaker (a conveniently-timed blizzard let me check that out before we bought). It’s maintained by the town, unlike the adventure-ridden driveways of a few houses we were looking at, and the town appears to be good at maintaining it.

Well, mud season officially started on Saturday, and my word for the road was “Wheeee!” The road has a posted limit of 6 tons for the next couple of months, but I think the town is somewhat generous. I probably would’ve posted the limit at about 50lbs, because that’s more or less all it takes to deform the road. A vehicle over six tons would probably never be seen again. Both Christine and I have all-wheel drive in our vehicles, and they’ve been getting a workout.

Today, it’s going to be even more fun, as the temperature is now right around freezing, and the road is covered by about six inches of snow, so you can’t see where the ruts are, but there’s a decent chance they’ll still be shifting underneath the snow.

Wheeeee!

It has only taken a year and three days to get running, but I finally have an on-site server responding correctly to IP addresses on two different ISPs, at the same time, without crashing either of the routers or doing unspeakable things to their firewalls.

And as an added bonus, I even understand why it’s working, I think.