Linux

My Reign as the King of Pings

I've been running Weblogs.Com since June for Dave Winer, who wanted to see if service performance could be improved as he began to receive seven-digit inquiries about selling it. Weblogs.Com ran on Frontier for six years from its founding in 1999, handling the load reasonably well until the number of pings topped one million per day within the last year. In a frenzied weekend, I recoded the site as an Apache/MySQL/PHP web application running on a Linux server, writing all of the code from ... (read more)

2005/10/12

I own a Linksys WRT54G, a 802.11g wireless access point, router, and four-port 10/100 Ethernet switch that runs Linux. InfoWorld columnist Robert X. Cringley singes the praises of the WRT54G, which is an amazing little Linux device that can be hacked to function as an Internet server. I've been using it on a Windows XP network to share a broadband Internet connection over several wired and wireless PCs around the house. As amazing as this device is, I learned something this morning: Even when ... (read more)

2005/08/31

My Saturday in Sendmail Hell

Sendmail problems are like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. You have to kill them a couple of times just to make sure they're really dead. I returned home after the jaunty 1,104-mile drive from Dallas to find this server with an 100 percent full disk, which was 70 percent more than the day before. The culprit was Sendmail, which bounced the same e-mail back and forth until it filled the disk. I burned a Saturday at the keyboard as feeling slowly returned to my butt cheeks -- one of these days, ... (read more)

2005/07/31

Robot Behaving Badly

Before I can run Urchin to track web traffic, the Apache script split-logfile creates log files for each virtual domain on my server. A bad request from a webcrawling robot breaks split-logfile: www.drudge.com//retort.shtml 65.19.150.252 - - [13/Jun/2005:03:50:15 -0400] "GET //retort.shtml HTTP/1.1" 400 323 "http://www.drudge.com//" "OmniExplorer_Bot/1.07 (+http://www.omni-explorer.com) Internet Categorizer" The error's in the first field: OmniExplorer_Bot should be requesting the page from the ... (read more)

2005/06/14

Server Attacked at Random

My server has been under attack for three days by a user in Colorado who requested the same URL 8.3 million times (and counting). The user, making simultaneous connections from eight IP addresses in a block controlled by Time Warner Telecom, requested a URL on URouLette that redirects to a random web site -- as many as 30 requests a second to a PHP script that made a MySQL database connection. I'm guessing the motive was to acquire web addresses for e-mail harvesting or some other form of net ... (read more)

2005/04/06

The Slow Route to FastAccess

Six hours I'll never get back: Hooking up a LinkSys WRT54G broadband router to my Windows XP box. The router, which I bought for around $50 after a rebate, is an amazing Linux device that's an 802.11g wireless access point, router, and four-port 10/100 Ethernet switch. You can reprogram it with SSH and a lot of other Linux software, turning it into a killer pint-sized wireless ISP. Robert X. Cringley calls it "disruptive technology": ... the WRT54G with Sveasoft firmware is all you need to ... (read more)

2005/01/21

The magazine eWeek broke a huge tech story that got lost over Thanksgiving: Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation are working on the first new version of the GNU Public License in 13 years. The changes planned for the next release, Version 3, a draft of which is due next year, focus on several broad topics that reflect the dynamic change in the software industry since the early 1990s—intellectual property licensing and patent issues, the question of how to deal with ... (read more)

2004/12/09

Secure Linux Practically a State Secret

In my mailbox: a review copy of O'Reilly's SELinux: NSA's Open Source Security Enhanced Linux, a new book by Bill McCarty on a Linux enhancement developed for the National Security Agency. I wasn't familiar with this project, but the book makes it tempting to carve off a hard drive partition this afternoon and try it out. SELinux offers role-based access control and privilege escalation baked into the kernel, as described by the NSA: This work is not intended as a complete security solution for ... (read more)

2004/12/03