CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?
Friday, October 27
I Didn't Order That!
Currently receiving 2000+ trackback spams per minute.
Yay.
Had to reconfigure Apache, which was choking under the load. Bloody Apache 1.3. Bloody CPanel. Grrr.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:16 AM
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1
Are all of these Italian spams coming from the same porn business?
Maybe you could do the Blue Frog thing and just auto-magically fill their sign up cgi with plausible looking garbage every time they spam you?
Posted by: Kristopher at Friday, October 27 2006 10:29 AM (O5Ju8)
2
.. hang in there, big guy..... remember, you are The Man....
Posted by: Eric at Friday, October 27 2006 04:29 PM (NlzwQ)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 27 2006 09:39 PM (sWLEp)
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Wednesday, October 25
Downloading Message 9511 Of 10537
It's good to be home.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:08 AM
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Oops.
There were comments here, but I zapped them.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, October 26 2006 10:26 PM (FRalS)
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I've updated the spam filter now. Let's see how that works.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 27 2006 09:19 AM (sWLEp)
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Friday, October 13
And Another Thing!
When I look at a Linux server, I don't want to see hundreds of megabytes of memory free. At least, not on a busy web/database server with several gigabytes of actively used files.
All that memory should either be used by programs or for caching files. If there's 500 megabytes free, that means that 500 megabyes of memory was being used by programs that have now exited. The only thing that should be using 500 megabytes of memory is the MySQL server, and that (for obvious reasons) should not exit.
One big culprit is Movable Type. On our database, the MT comment script can use 60MB of memory; the search script used 300MB until I replaced it. A spamming run can easily fire up ten comments simultaneously (since they are not only extraordinarily inefficient in terms of memory use, but also in terms of speed). Then Fluffy kills them, and I'm left with a 600MB hole unaccounted for.
Another one is the Analog web stats package. I've just disabled it system-wide because it was using 300MB of memory to produce the stats for a single web site. (I've forgotten which one, but not one of the big ones like Ace or the Jawas.)
And then there's Apache. Leave it alone on a server with PHP and CGI and all kinds of other crap running, and you'll soon find individual Apache worker processes using 40 to 60MB each. If you have a hundred of those, that's 4 to 6GB of memory gone, which is probably more than you actually have.
Of course, if you're not running CPanel, you're probably running something reasonable like Apache 2.2 or lighttpd or, well, anything other than Apache 1.3.
Anyway, something is flushing useful data out of memory, and something is slowing down my blog, and I think it's the same something.
So until morale improves I'll be lining the suspects up against the wall and shooting them one by one.
(Minx itself is an interesting case. It's using 152MB of virtual memory for 10 threads, but only 15MB of that is resident. Why it does this I don't know, but unless I enable Psyco, the resident size never increases.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:12 AM
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Um... I hate to bug you, Pixy, but The Pond seems to have disappeared (it's been missing for at least four hours). I've tried to go to http://wonderduck.mu.nu and just get a blank window. I've checked it on three different computers, too, so it's not just Chiyo-chan.
Help?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, October 13 2006 09:27 PM (6YRS5)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 13 2006 10:06 PM (FRalS)
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, October 14 2006 12:52 AM (CJ5+Y)
4
Pixy, I also hate to bug you, but I have the same problem as Wonderduck. Texasbestgrok's been whited out for more than 12 hours now. Help! (And Thanks!)
Posted by: JohnL at Saturday, October 14 2006 09:44 AM (YVul2)
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Doh! Just saw your comment on munuviana.mu.nu; should have started there. I rebuilt my site and it reappeared. Thanks for everything you do for MuNu.
Posted by: JohnL at Saturday, October 14 2006 10:04 AM (YVul2)
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Welcome back! A spammed MuNu is better than no MuNu at all.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, October 18 2006 06:27 PM (+rSRq)
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I'm on holidays at the moment, with intermittent internet access, and that only when I'm not being upchucked on by my infant nephew. (Darn it, I liked that shirt!)
I'm going to look for some Sugar and Galaxy Angel DVDs today. :)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, October 18 2006 07:38 PM (f0Uie)
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Do you think the spam-bots are looking for the words "hollidays" or "time off" in blogs?
A bunch of comment spam started slamming in the day Pixy announced a temp absence.
Posted by: Kristopher at Saturday, October 21 2006 10:37 AM (O5Ju8)
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How do you say "spam" in Italian? (or "Bugger off, you spammy wankers"?)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, October 22 2006 07:03 PM (+rSRq)
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Free memory yawns
Pixy scolds naughty server
Spam uber alles.
Posted by: TallDave at Monday, October 23 2006 12:21 AM (wBY8q)
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I'm back!
Now I just need to catch up on a week of lost sleep. [It took me three tries to type the word "sleep", just to give you an idea of my present level of function.]
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 24 2006 01:00 AM (sWLEp)
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Pixy's home!!!
Vacation's over.
Welcome back to real world.
Live badger down shorts.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, October 24 2006 01:36 AM (YWRlP)
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Leech-o-Rama
What is it with these guys?
They show up, download 5GB from a website that only has 300MB worth of files, and disappear.
Sure, I now have 4TB of bandwidth to play with, but that doesn't mean I'm happy for these idiots to just burn through it like that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:29 AM
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Who was it? Sounds like the kind of thing that bad-mannered spiders do.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, October 13 2006 12:36 AM (+rSRq)
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No identification. One from a LayeredTech server, one from a ThePlanet server, one from the Netherlands. Not from any of the usual spiders.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 13 2006 12:42 AM (FRalS)
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Use robots.txt on a page to post it as off limits to robots. Hide links to it from mere users via javascript trickery.
Ban every IP that visits it.
Posted by: Kristopher at Saturday, October 14 2006 11:02 AM (O5Ju8)
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Tuesday, October 10
ZOMG
200GB/2TB $9.95.
I'm assuming that they're banking on a 100:1 oversell - which is probably reasonable. I wonder what they would do if I actually started using that 2TB every month...
Update: Seek and ye shall find. Dreamhost blog: The Truth About Overselling.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:55 AM
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Bah, I know all about the technical side of overselling. After all, Linux overcommits memory (oh noes! horrors!). Nonetheless, there's overselling and there's overselling. After certain treshold, what they do is not sustainable and ends with the meltdown.
In any case, Dreamhost's indictment lists more than just interesting provisioning practices. Look at this:
http://anime.jefflawson.net/2006/10/06/autumn-nap/
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, October 10 2006 02:51 AM (9imyF)
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Oh bah, never mind the above. I see your comment now.
BTW, Read Dreamhost's "About Us" page. It's a riot. I can just imagine two Claremont dropouts running the whole shebang on an old Dell with UML virtual systems out of their dorm. Refreshing honesty about everything being virtual (no wonder oversubscribtion has to be so great).
Oh yeah, http://www.chiyochan.net/ is hosted at Dreamhost. Apparently it was a hobby of one of the founders.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, October 10 2006 02:59 AM (9imyF)
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Yup. That's where I came from.
I have a good use for heaps of cheap bandwidth and disk space - even if it's not 100% reliable - but I doubt Dreamhost would be happy with me using 20TB of disk and 200TB of bandwidth a month.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 10 2006 03:01 AM (FRalS)
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I host with Dreamhost, and I must say I am quite happy with them... Tho, I don't think I have as beefy a requirement as you do. :) Their honesty is what hooked me. I don't mind when hosts have issues, but damn come out and tell us! Ya know!?
Posted by: Slack at Tuesday, October 10 2006 06:03 PM (cVd8b)
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Yeah I got a mate on Dreamhost and he's recommended them.
Posted by: Tanj at Wednesday, October 11 2006 12:04 AM (jndMe)
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Sunday, October 08
Cool Computer Facts
Number 87:
Disk drives are not supposed to go "beep".
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:18 PM
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That... sounds ominous. Like a clown has taken up residence in your HD.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, October 08 2006 08:39 PM (CJ5+Y)
2
Sorry to bug you, Pixy, but I'm seeming to have some problems logging into http://blog.mu.nu . I'm getting the following message:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.36 Server at www.blog.mu.nu Port 80
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, October 09 2006 02:42 AM (YWRlP)
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That means that your DNS hasn't updated yet.
If you want to manually tweak your hosts file, the new address for blog.mu.nu is 208.101.63.192.
Same for wonderduck.mu.nu if you have any problems with that.
But it should all sort itself out in a few hours.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 09 2006 03:07 AM (YnQfp)
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It's sorted. Thanky!
On a different note, I sent you an e-mail (to the bloglets address); is there a different e-mail I should be using? If so, could you drop me a line to let me know what it is?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, October 09 2006 03:42 AM (YWRlP)
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andrew -at- pixymisa -dot- net is a better one to use. The bloglets address is absolutely flooded with spam. :(
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 09 2006 03:58 AM (YnQfp)
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Saturday, October 07
Bah2
The failure stopped being intermittent.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:50 AM
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Posted by: Andrew at Sunday, October 08 2006 08:21 AM (81C4m)
2
You get his wallet, I'll get his phaser and smoking boots.
Posted by: Kristopher at Tuesday, October 10 2006 11:19 AM (O5Ju8)
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