The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Monday, November 24, 2003

Oddities found on a webserver

I've been hired to admin a few webservers. Not a lot of money, but the intent is to get them running smoothly by themselves and just collect money from month to month (but I do have to respond to emergency situations but I get extra for that).

So I spent today poking around the servers, getting a feel for how they're set up, what the typical load is, and how set things up so they run themselves. I'm looking through the error log file (it runs Apache) when I notice the following:

[Tue Nov 18 16:28:19 2003] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawning 8 children, there are 0 idle, and 18 total children

First off, that tells me their web server configuration could use some tweaking, but secondly, I've never seen that error! That is quite neat actually.

Secondly, since this is a rather busy webserver, I'm seeing all sorts of web based attacks hitting the servers, stuff I've never seen before, which makes this interesting (in an academic sort of way—as a practical matter it's annoying). And some stuff that is just outright puzzling.

But if anything, it should prove to be an interesting job.

Obligatory Picture

An abstract representation of where you're coming from]

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

Obligatory AI Disclaimer

No AI was used in the making of this site, unless otherwise noted.

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

Copyright © 1999-2024 by Sean Conner. All Rights Reserved.