ExTechOps

Google has closed its search engine in China in a dispute over hacking and censorship. As an English/Japanese site, habilis.net has never seen much traffic from Google China, so the last hit was in early March. Someone in Beijing searched for “mac os lynx“:
221.x.x.x – - [09/Mar/2010:09:18:29 -0800] “GET /lynxlet/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 3355 “http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=mac+os+lynx&btnG=Google+%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&aq=f&oq=” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; [...]

If you have an account at a managed hosting service (shared hosting, VPS, etc), system reboots can be unexpected and confusing events. Sysadmins need to reboot for a variety of reasons — hardware problems, security patches, vandalism — and they rarely inform users before or even after the reboot. All you might see are some [...]

The 2006 RandomCoder article, “JSESSIONID considered harmful” mentions that a Google search on URLs with “jsessionid” in them resulted in 76 million results. Now in 2010, there are over one billion pages with “jsessionid” in the URL!
Although I understand the motivation behind URL-based session-ids (support cookie-less users), it seems inconceivable that all billion of these [...]

If you monitor your website error log, you often see strange events. For example, I saw three near-simultaneous hits to an incorrect URL from three different continents! One hit each from Fort Mitchell (Kentucky, USA), Seoul (South Korea), and Jiddah (Saudi Arabia).
[Thu Jan 01 11:27:16 2009] [error] [client 67.201.111.13] File does not exist: /habilis.net/chucHTTP
[Thu Jan 01 11:27:22 2009] [error] [...]

Cron jobs are great, but it is very easy to forget what jobs are running, especially if you’re administering multiple cron tables on different servers. The solution is to add a crontab reminder job at the top of every cron table, which emails a listing of the cron table every month:
@monthly        : [...]