I was researching on a ajaxy table edit and stumbled upon this useful site – ajaxdaddy.com
Bots hitting my site.
The server is kind of up – not yet open to the public but the bots know about it already. I always keep checking the error logs for such abnormalities.It helps a great deal if you clean all the warning messages your Application is throwing – this way the errors that come up in error logs are genuine and you can monitor your server better.
Wondering if I should invest some time in a script to have a look at these logs – see if a “file does not exist” error happens in error_log and then take the ip address and see what got accessed in access_log – to see if the system is compromised.
On the below code scroll to the right to see the bot’s probes.
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:29 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/README
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:29 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/horde
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:29 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/horde2
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:29 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/horde3
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:29 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/horde-3.0.5
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:30 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/horde-3.0.6
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:31 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/horde-3.0.7
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:31 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/horde-3.0.8
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:31 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/horde-3.0.9
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:31 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/mail
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:31 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/email
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:32 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/webmail
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:32 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/newmail
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:32 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/mails
[Mon Oct 20 01:39:32 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/mailz
[Mon Oct 20 01:46:35 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/cacti
[Mon Oct 20 01:46:35 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/stats
[Mon Oct 20 01:46:35 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] script '/home/*****/html/graph_image.php' not found or unable to stat
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:56 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] script '/home/*****/html/xmlrpc.php' not found or unable to stat
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:56 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/xmlrpc
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:56 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/xmlsrv
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:57 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/blog
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:57 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/drupal
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:57 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/community
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:58 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/blogs
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:58 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/blogs
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:58 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/blog
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:59 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/blogtest
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:59 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/b2
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:59 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/b2evo
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:59 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/wordpress
[Mon Oct 20 02:05:59 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/phpgroupware
home/*****/html/awstats.pl
[Mon Oct 20 02:27:17 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] script not found or unable to stat: /home/*****/cgi-bin/awstats.pl
[Mon Oct 20 02:27:17 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/scgi-bin
[Mon Oct 20 02:27:18 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /var/www/html/awstats/awstats.pl
[Mon Oct 20 02:27:18 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/scgi-bin
[Mon Oct 20 02:27:19 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/cgi
[Mon Oct 20 02:27:19 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/scgi
[Mon Oct 20 02:27:19 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/scripts
[Mon Oct 20 02:27:20 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/scgi-bin
[Mon Oct 20 02:27:20 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] script not found or unable to stat: /home/*****/cgi-bin/stats
[Mon Oct 20 02:27:20 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/scgi-bin
[Mon Oct 20 02:27:20 2008] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/*****/html/stats
No you take the bill, no you pay the bill!!
Senator Obama and Senator Mc Cain meet each other on the eve of the November Elections. Both are in a generous mood.
BO : Hey John. I thought a lot about the past few months and I want to apologize for all the things I told about you.
JC : Same here. I too want to apologize. I should have treated you like one of my grand sons.
OB : Anyway, coming to the heart of the matter, I want to withdraw from the Presidential race.
JC : Hain? You crazy or what. You are leading the charts, go ahead it is your cake. Eat it.
OB : Well I think only you can handle the economy and war and all that. I am still a bachoo you see compared to you. So please become the President.
JC : My dear grand son listen to me. I do not want any part of it. I just joined the Presidential race because I was bored. The Bushs had made sure no republican will ever win the election in his lifetime. I joined the race because lot of people are dependent on this circus – media, my friend Bill O’Reilly..and also my autobiography will sell well if I am an also ran for President. I dont want any part of this economy mess, Iraq mess. I will be happy signing autographs in my book and reading WSJ, WPost about the mess you are in. Its good to be at the other side of the aisle beta.. you will learn when you reach my age.
OB : Kelatu …..
JC : I knew that reference from Indian movie. Poda podipayya. Good luck and good night.
Starting up on a bad economy
With the US and Europe banks falling like bowling pins all around, I keep hearing – this is only the tip of the ice berg – I do question myself – Is it wise to start up now? So I keep my eyes peeled for any news on startup and recession in the same line.
Here is a an article on how its good to start a startup during recession.
For hackers – your competition is less. You cohackers and competitors are probably hanging tight to their jobs or going to join a job or doing their degree. Also things will be cheaper during recession. And Apple,Google,Microsoft all started on a recession.
For investors – buy when the market is bad. Invest in start ups now – against conventional wisdom – so when market picks up and start up is not start up any more – you reap better rewards.
Thats what I read ( I read what I want to hear :D) – you can make your own views from the article.
Double Whammy for my bong people
I am half a bong so I can talk about myself. So dont throw fish bones at me. Chew them instead 😉
In the last 2 weeks 2 important events happened in West Bengal.
Nano moved out and Ganguly puts his stinky feet up. These 2 are isolated incidents and both happen in different sections of the newspaper – business and sports. However I read both and since the events happened close by I have to connect the 2 dots.
Ganguly – love him or hate him he does hold a mind space among us. There is this IndiaWatchDogs website which was born 3 years back mainly because of Ganguly ( to talk on how to throw him out of the Indian team ). Or the 100000hours of coffee time that bored techies talk about Dada – for and against. Ganguly has done a great service in entertaining the masses. A salute to him. And of course he has scored some runs in that boring game called cricket – which I have striken off from the list of things that I classify as sports.
Nano – I am waiting eagerly for it. Its like linux – give it to the masses and they will change the world. It wont take much time before the dead fossil digester – a 28% efficient combustion engine !! is thrown out and some one puts in a 95% efficient electric motor ( yes – compare the doctored lab notes lying on a Thermodynamics lab and a doctored lab notes of a electric machines lab ). I will get one – no will get two nanos once they do that. So I can carry passengers in one and batteries in another.
Now the 2 or 3 month delay my dear Mamta and Buddadheb have caused is a minor set back. But thanks for upping the ante now before Nano started rolling off the assembly line from Singur – and then if they had done their “politics” – Tata could not have pulled out of West Bengal. Thanks thanks and thanks – for your short term vision in your politics too. Love you both. I will give you a dinner in Leela Palace when you come to Bangalore. Its on me.
Now how does Ganguly and Nano link – is it the beginning of an end and the beginning of a new beginning. Whatever – perhaps Tata ropes in Ganguly to model the car – then my bongers will go boinkers. You never know. Now that will be the Raj Bhog gift back to WB from Tata.
You Used that Programming Language to Write What??
I stumbled upon this nice post about the tech choices we have. Resonates with my earlier post about PHP – how its good as a prototype bring it out fast language but needs to be re written in Java in the long run.
http://www.cio.com/article/193750/You_Used_THAT_Programming_Language_to_Write_What_
Office space under 500Rs !!
My budget is for the stationery that I added – not the gizmos I had painstakingly collected over these years – that will be my next post – the stuff that runs on electricity.
Whats in my home office
1. Stickies – 40Rs
2. Color sketch pens – 20Rs
3. World Map – 200Rs
4. India Map – 150Rs
5. LIC diary – 0Rs ( given free by my agent )
I do miss having a white board but it is prohibitively expensive – a decent sized one costs 4000Rs – and also the white board markers are not cheap either.
The backside of the maps are very effective card walls – stickies cling on to them nicely. And I can move the card wall easily. Now I have a visual progression of my project.
You are wondering what is a card wall? It is a must have in any agile project – it visually depicts the “stories” waiting to be played, being played, the ones that are in QA’s desk and the ones that have been passed by the QA.
In the first week I did not have the card wall and my partner ( Sangeeta – my wife who is supporting me in this venture) had a tough time visualizing where we are going. Then I hung the world map and laid out the stickies and both of us now have a better idea of what is happening. Now she is totally bought up on the card wall and has made her own now ( with the India map ).
I first thought of categorizing bugs, features, tech stuff with different colors – but then it became too corporatish so I decided to not worry about such things and now I use any sketch that comes to my hand. Its nice to doodle in different colors – keeps the brain in “invent” mode.
Next post : The hardware being used to create the online portal.
Why PHP?
I have decided to build the online portal in PHP, supported by Apache, MySQL hosted on Linux. The most cliched LAMP model.
Did I consider other players?
* Ruby on Rails : It was very much on my plate. I have done small utilities ( a server status monitor and a code snippet repository ) in rails and was blown away by the speed and simplicity of doing things. However 2 things went against RoR.
ORM : My last project was a .NET project on Hibernate. It was a 2 year old project and already it felt like a legacy application with things tuned for performance to the maximum. They had crossed the return on investment period of Hibernate ( when relations stay simple at the beginning of any project ) and now were paying heavily for having Hibernate – performance, complexity, things moving to stored procedures..the usual pain points. So active Record did not interest me – being a one man army I did not want battles couple of months from now when I have to hack to implement a feature.
Server support: Nothing can beat mod_php running on Apache. I had to configure nothing. zilch. With ROR things are still emerging – and I do not have the confidence in this space. A good part of my time does go in administering Apache but its something I am quite familiar. I neednot muck with monit or spend lot of time playing with mongrel (a cluster inside one node!!) to have my app working. Apache just sits there smiling at me doing its work super efficiently.
*Java : I am more familiar with Java and its framework than PHP. But the pace of development, team that is required, hosting requirements is just not feasible nor affordable. When this portal takes off big time I will rewrite it in Java – with a team. That will scale well, be stable – rock solid, and well maintenable. But the goal here is to bring something out as fast as possible, give it to as many people as possible and create a mind space.
*ASP.NET : Forget it. I will not recommend it to anyone – even if I get a 1 billion dollar project to redo microsoft.com. ( well on second thoughts I might reconsider 😀 – I am not Howard Roark !!)
Hosting : LAMP Hosting is cheap. I decided to go with a Virtual Private Server – gives me lot of freedom and flexibility. It takes some effort and linux know how – but its worth the trouble. More on this later.
In conclusion Php suited me well for the portal I am building – fast and quick ( but dirty like hell imagine code spread all over the place : $this->some_function($this-variable); It hurts the eyes !! )
Next post : How I set up my office space for under 500Rs !!
A little about me and who this blog is for
Who am I?
I am a “techie” who lives in Bangalore. But now I have taken a break to embark on a journey – auspiciously on the day Lehmann Brothers went bankrupt, Goldmann Sachs got degraded and blood bath happened in Wall Street. A journey to explore what it is like to go on your own – to be your own boss and create a business.
Currently I am building an apartment management plus residents communication portal targetted at mid to large sized apartment complexes. Its an alternative to yahoo groups, google groups and orkut that most of the residents use for apartment related communication.
Who this blog is for?
I have been toying with the idea of starting something on my own for quite a long time. Have read lot of blog posts, books and finally now I have taken the plunge. I intend to help out the souls who want to take the plunge – share my experience and learnings in this new life of mine. Also inviting ideas, tips, tricks that you think might help me in my quest.
Also, to keep myself committed to this blog, I am going to say what I am going to post next – on every post.
Next post is going to be about the choice of technology for my portal. Being a techie thats what I can think of first. Stay tuned!!
Google has run out of space !!
Now I have to reschedule all my appointments because of this…ughh..
“
Thank you for your interest in Google Developer Day India. Due to huge demand we unfortunately have run out of space and are unable to accommodate your registration this year. We encourage you to check out our new APIs and Developer Tools on code.google.com. Hope to see you next year.
Sincerely,
Google Developer Team”
