Some German bot(s) seemed to take interest in one of Cogneato’s sites, Rockin Houston. The aging site is fairly inefficient with a lot of data, and the bot was causing high load on our DB server. I have implemented a PHP blocker for certain IPs, but I wanted something more broadly applicable. I made a rate limiting rule on Cloudflare that should block this type of behavior and prevent it from even hitting our server once the rule triggers.
Continue reading post "Annoying bot and Cloudflare free rate limiting"server posts
JS: ES Modules and Node bare specifiers via response rewrite
I’ve been playing with JS lately, including ES modules and building with Rollup, Babel, and Terser, along with other accessories. One thing I’m disappointed with of ES modules in the Nodejs ecosystem is dealing with third party imports. Using the “bare” specifiers that Node expects works fine in that environment and thus tools running in it (possibly needing helpers), but they don’t work at all directly in the browser. This is discussed in this post by Jake Archibold, for instance.
Import maps are one solution in the works, but that requires explicitly mapping every dependency, which could get complicated fast when dependencies have dependencies. It also is only in draft stage and only works in Blink based browsers currently.
I eventually gave in to the idea of having server code rewrite the paths in the js file responses to point to a symlinked node_modules folder, similar to what is mentioned in this post by the Polymer project. I created a PHP test server for one of my projects that does this.
Looking at Apache logs with command line tools
In my web development career, I have countless times needed to look at Apache logs to figure out or find out about problems with sites, monitor activity, or for various other purposes. I’ve used command line tools to help with this, often looking for strings and counting occurrences. Since I recently needed to create a command string to count unique IP’s connected to a given string in the logs, I thought I’d post about it and a few related useful commands.
Continue reading post "Looking at Apache logs with command line tools"DreamCompute downtime incident 2020
There was another DreamCompute incident leading to downtime of my site / server.
Continue reading post "DreamCompute downtime incident 2020"New server setup at Cogneato
I’m kind of excited that we moved the first site onto a new server setup at Cogneato. I had worked off and on on the setup for months before we finally went forward with it. It brings a new OS, new host, new software, and a number of other changes to our previous setup.
Continue reading post "New server setup at Cogneato"Somehow, my recent upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 switched the Apache MPM module installed and thus disabled HTTP2 for PHP requests on my server.
Continue reading post "#2889"Server upgrade: Ubuntu 20.04
I upgraded my server from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 this weekend.
Continue reading post "Server upgrade: Ubuntu 20.04"DreamCompute disruption incident
My server and site were down for about 16 hours from Tuesday evening (β18:08) to Wednesday morning (β10:36). This was due to a significant problem that occurred due to an upgrade to the Ceph system running Dreamcompute. Numerous people were affected, based on Twitter posts, and we still have little information about what happened.
Continue reading post "DreamCompute disruption incident"So, this site was down for like 16 hours due to a botched update of DreamCompute by Dreamhost. Back up and running now. Will report more when I get home tonight.
2784, the first HTTP port
Looking at a page discussing the code of the first web browser (WorldWideWeb), I noticed a line designating port 2784 as OLD_TCP_PORT. After looking into it a bit more, I determined that this was the port used for the web until port 80 was officially designated in January of 1992.