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.
