Webmasters Blog – Salem-News.com

Archive for the ‘apache’ Category

Another turn with helping a friend with Drupal.

This time an install of the FCKeditor module. All seemed to go well until creating a page brought up the error – Toolbar set “DrupalFiltered” doesn’t exist’.

Initially I went to work looking for errors in the FCKeditor module / or FCKeditor itself but luckly checked the php error log and found two errors
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Hot linked images has never been much of an issue for this site (salem-news). Having news summarized along with a pictures on a wide variety of sites make blocking of all hot linked images not a possibility.

But a growing number of spam blogs (blogs that do nothing but post pictures, text and links from other sites for the purpose of gaining search ranking) using images from the site required some sort of response.

Using the method from Blocking certain sites from hotlinking images via mod_rewrite

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?badsite1\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?badsite2\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ images/no_hotlink.jpg [L]

Is close to what I wanted but preferred to just 403 all referrals from domains by keyword where keyword is the domain name or enough of the domain name to be unique and only block that domain or similar sub domains. I’m not worried about sending a no hot linking allowed image as most likely the sites do not care they are just up to mislead search bots.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (keyword1) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (keyword2) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (keyword3) [NC]
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

In a possible sign of the poor economy beginning to hit the Internet Netcraft`s web server survey showed a loss of 1.23 million sites.

In the January 2009 survey we received responses from 185,497,213 sites, reflecting an uncharacteristic monthly loss of 1.23 million sites.

Apache’s market share grew by more than 1 percentage point this month, extending its lead over Microsoft IIS, which has fallen to less than a third of the market. In total, Apache gained 1.27 million sites this month.

Microsoft showed the largest loss this month, after more than 2 million blogging sites running on Microsoft-IIS websites expired from the survey.

January 2009 Web Server Survey

On Monday November 5^th I realized we were undergoing a Denial of Service attack aimed at draining bandwidth. I believe it started rather weak in October but I began to notice the Kilobytes of traffic had grown far higher then it should based on other traffic statistics. See: Day 1 Analyzing and adjusting on day two: Day Two

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Yester day I noticed that Salem-News.com was under a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDOS) that seemed to be aimed at using up bandwidth as at its highest rate was no more than 60 per minute and averaging less than 30 per minute, all aimed at images. See: Bandwidth DDOS Attack.

After stopping the bandwidth waste with mod_rewrite it was time to poor through the log files to try and get some more information on how this was happening.
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