May 31, 2003
And They Rotated!
After my battle with the image linkers over the last few months, I've managed to get the situation under control -- even to the point where I have only been logging the 'bad attempts' to get images. I've been doing this for two reasons: 1) to catch people 'in the act', and 2) to study patterns.Certain patterns can show up in the log files indicating that the referral information is being blocked (or not sent). This can be due to the browser, firewall, network, anything between here and the user. Sadly, using referrals isn't the best way to do what I needed to do (although it was the most transparent -- which is why I used this method). But, sadly some users must suffer in this case...all because of a few people taking advantage of a situation.
Anyway, as I mentioned I've only been logging the 'bad requests' for the last several weeks. That's great, but the log files were getting somewhat largish. Of course, I could just manually rotate and gzip them, but that's too much work. Instead, I installed/customized a Perl script I found online which works similar (near identical) to that of logrotate in Linux. And thanks to cron, I've got this process scheduled -- so it's completely automatic. On the 1st and 15th of each month, I rotate the file and compress the old one.
Power Problems?
A few months back, I purchased an ATX power supply tester while picking up some other odds and ends. I didn't necessarily anticipate using it for real purposes any time in the near future, but actually ended up using it to diagnose a real problem -- one which was becoming semi-obvious but not overly trivial. Needless to say, I will have to buy a power supply for replacement on Monday. Not on any of my machines, though. Everything here at home seems to be working just fine as of late...even when the power went out for a few seconds a couple of days ago.
6 of 7
Today marked day 6 of 7 straight at work. I have to go back there tonight (at close) to help one of the new people do the correct 'end of day' things in the cash registers...but aside from that I've got about 6 hours remaining before my first day off in a week.
This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07