Shotty uptime for the past week
For the past week, I've noticed that my site was going down every couple hours and I'd have to restart JBoss in order to get it to come back. Being in busy mode all week, I didn't have time to figure out why. Yesterday, I spent 10 minutes digging around in my logs to find out that some asshat(borrowed from Hani) was hitting my server every couple milliseconds requesting my blog as an attempt to infect me with tons of referral spam. My poor server was crashing with out of memory errors at a record pace and it was getting worse and worse by the minute. His calls were coming in from 2 distinct IP Addresses (217.23.176.2 , 217.23.177.249), both of which originate in Russia. To get around this, I configured iptables to DROP packets from these addresses. All is fine since. The thing that concerns me is that this is quite the reactive approach and could start again at any moment. Thanks to the free service provided by SiteUptime, I get a text message sent to my cell phone when my site goes down. This will help a bit. What I'd like to do is write some sort of script to learn what ip addresses might be doing this, add their ip on the fly and restart iptables. If this becomes a problem, I'll look into this more.
So the moral of the story is that if you are pathetic enough to inject referral spam, I hope you die a long painful death in the dungeons of hell. In the meantime, I will ignore you with the help of iptables.
iTunes 4.9 - Podcast comments
After downloading iTunes 4.9 early this morning and moving all of my podcasts from NetNewsWire to iTunes, all I can say is that this integration is phenomenal. Before NetNewsWire would pull all the rss feeds and save rss enclosures to a particular folder while importing mp3's into iTunes. This worked well with one small unwanted side affect. That side affect is my having to wander through my music collection to delete old podcasts (You can't delete entries through playlists). Now with iTunes 4.9, there is a podcast menu where all of your content gets stored. It's easy to get to and very unobtrusive. There are even settings to tell iTunes when to remove the podcasts. All in all this feature will save me a few minutes from time to time and I like that.
My hiatus
Well it has been a long while since I last posted a blog entry, 54 days to be exact. A lot has happened in that timeframe. On a technical level, I'm in the process of dumping my current website which is written as a model 1 JSP app and moving over to Tapestry. I have the shell created but the hard work is still to come. I think I'm going to scale it back since most of the pages that are currently out there are not even interesting to me :)
On the Ruby front, I've been involved with the St Louis Ruby User Group for about 3 months now. The 3rd formal meeting is tonight. Hopefully I'll have more time to dive in soon.
On a personal level, our first child, Alex, was born June 1st so the past 4 weeks have been a whirlwind. It is an awesome experience but very time consuming. Things like learning Ruby and redesigning my site have been put on the back burner. Hopefully now that Alex is sleeping more I will have additional spare time to work on those things. Fall/Winter have always been my most productive seasons anyway since summer tends to be nonstop.