FAQs

What & Why

November 2001. Sendmail started hogging the CPU. Emails were apparently streaming out of the Darwin server. I was a spam relayer! Oh my God! The computer had been compromised, perhaps by an auto-penetrating virus that installs helpful files (in the hidden .puta directory) and a root login on vulnerable computers.

What to do?

Raze the computer and start from scratch. Feverish technicians reinstalled Linux and slaved my original hard drive so I could recover the data. No executable is run without checking its permissions and code for worms.

As you can imagine, this took a long time. Apache was installed, then needed to be recompiled with increased process limit, again breaking the ReWrite Engine. Sendmail's virtual tables were oddly changed, sensitive to case and slightly modified formatting, and sendmail itself had a broken configuration that didn't descend into the alias directory, but merely noted that it should. And installing the better FTP server, and so on!

One week later a salesman sold me more server for less money. I asked if he could instead simply reduce my fees on the old model? No it had to be a fresh computer. So the technicians, who had literally spent an entire week working on this one machine, were told to start again from scratch.

Jacob put an end to that. Tell them to clone the hard drive and see if they can configure it to accept the new hardware!" And he was right, they did, it worked, whew!

The new server: 733MHz Pentium w/50 gig of disks and something like 356 MB RAM.

Older Stuff

January 2000. The server bogged down with traffic. Slow and no-loads were common. I tried adjusting the Apache config (below) but that failed to open the dam. The Skynet guy noticed that we maxed out at 256 servers (ps -e | grep httpd | wc -l) so it seemed that we had actually reached the built-in server process limit of 256. Why this undocumented limit, nobody knows. I'm pushing the limits of what's possible here, eking out the full measure of use for my enormous... website.

What to do?

Upgrade to Apache 1.3.14, edit that line, recompile. Prognosis: Looks like the CPU is good for about 450 processes before the CPU gives out at 2,500,000 page views a day.

Now my rewrite rules don't work. Oh well, they were probably wasting power to forward obsolete links to the right pages. Let users of Altavista suffer!

January 6, 2001