by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 18, 2003 | Front Page
I have been noticing in my referer log a couple of hits that looks to me like hits simply to spam my logs.
217.73.164.106 – – [13/Oct/2003:17:49:35 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 21978 “http://www.kwmap.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [13/Oct/2003:17:49:35 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 21978 “http://www.kwmap.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [14/Oct/2003:10:12:31 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 21978 “http://www.kwmap.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [14/Oct/2003:10:12:31 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 21978 “http://www.kwmap.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [04/Nov/2003:08:13:52 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 26409 “http://www.websearchde.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [12/Nov/2003:22:42:50 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27410 “http://www.wr18.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [15/Nov/2003:10:41:49 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27053 “http://www.malixya.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
141.85.3.130 – – [16/Nov/2003:21:34:49 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27053 “http://www.worldnewslog.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
141.85.3.130 – – [17/Nov/2003:03:23:07 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27053 “http://www.mikesspot.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
141.85.3.130 – – [17/Nov/2003:10:15:22 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27053 “http://www.a-b-l-o-g.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
141.85.3.130 – – [17/Nov/2003:17:12:02 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27360 “http://www.teoras.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [18/Nov/2003:04:10:25 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27323 “http://www.websearchus.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
217.73.164.106 – – [18/Nov/2003:22:25:51 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 27323 “http://www.saulem.com/” “MSIE 6.0”
The thing that makes me think they are spam bots is that all they ever do is ask for the main page, none of my images, CSS or anything like that – and the obvious fake user agent.
I looked a bit at the IP addresses in various databases and they are from Romanian educational networks and all the sites being advertised are from Romania.
So I think it is time I add user_agent = “MSIE 6.0” to my deny lists.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 17, 2003 | Front Page
Anyone who checks out their Technorati profile regularly will have noticed the slow-downs, David Sifry has some updates on things. In the article he mentions these amasing stats:
Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we’re adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We’re also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.
I wonder how many of these update regularly since there has been much talk around the fact that the typical blog is run by a 16 year old girl who gets bored of it after 30 days.
And while on the subject of technorati profiles, its rather depressing that about:blank has larger link cosmos than many blogs ๐
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 13, 2003 | Front Page
I noticed on NT Bugtraq a overview of forthcoming changes to XP introduced by SP2. It contains preliminary information on changes made to better protect email, network, browsing and memory on XP machines, well worth reading.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 8, 2003 | Front Page
For years now my daily hobby is to nurture my ignore list on freshmeat, its an obsession, each morning I check the days page (and what i missed on the last day) and I ignore things that do not interest me. The things that do interest me gets a visit to the home page and I check it out, if its something I do not like it gets ignored.
Scoop has been making my work easier with the addition of buttons on the front page for quick ignore. Today I asked him to enable a bulk unignore on the list of the days ignored projects and he turned it around in less than 30 minutes, amasing. So I asked him about ignore lists, mine being 11 986 projects big at the moment, turns out I am 10th largest and the largest is about 40% larger than mine!
Maybe I should remove the category ignores on things like Python and start ignoring those individually ๐
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 4, 2003 | Front Page
Today I noticed something very strange on a few Linux machines.
I needed a 10 Mb file to do some bandwidth tests, I would just put it on a web server and download it often. I used dd to create a file that I thought was 10Mb and checked it with du -h:
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=10megfile.dat bs=1024 count=10240
# ls -l 10megfile.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10485760 nov 4 16:38 10megfile.dat
# du -h 10megfile.dat
11M 10megfile.dat
So I thought I am going mad since surely du cannot be wrong, I checked with the Google Calculator and it agrees, 10 485 760 bytes does make 10 Mb.
I then checked the same on FreeBSD and it finds it as 10Mb, RedHat 6.2 agrees it is 10Mb but RedHat 7.2 and a number of Mandrake machines thinks it is 11Mb.
I guess I need to have a chat with bug-fileutils@gnu.org
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 3, 2003 | Front Page
Today comes the official notice from RedHat that it is pulling out of the Free distribution business and focussing on its Enterprise market.
Their recent allignment with Fedora Linux project will no doubt be the future for the free RedHat in what seems to be a re-branding rather than a huge shift in their business. I have been a RedHat user since pre version 1 and this is a bit of a sad thing for me, but on the other hand I have become rather unimpressed with RedHat since the 6.2 days and later.
I have now installed a little working machine running Debian and am considering moving my single production Linux server to that rather than the current RedHat 7.2 which runs out of support end of December. I am hoping that before then the options from Fedora will become clear and I will be able to make a more educated decision, but for now I am all for Debian, it certainly seems nice and minimal while doing just what you ask it and no more.
