Toms View of the World

All the downtime of this server appears to have been caused by Gigablast’s search crawler hammering my site. I’ve now blocked the IP range it’s using (64.62.*.*) by adding the following line to my .htaccess file - it was hitting pages at a phenominal rate, from a large range of source IP addresses…

deny from 64.62.

Yes, that’s denying access to all traffic which originated from any IP address starting 64.62 - it’s not a typo!

I advise eveyone else to do the same, and since doing so, the server loads have plummetted and the machine seems stable again.

It still is trying to hammer the server, but the new htaccess rule is limiting it’s effect on the server loads… as it’s now being blocked at connection rather than causing a php process and several database retrievals… it’s still trying to retrive pages every few seconds, and it’s ignored all changes to robots.txt and the META tags on these pages - which they claim it respects. A week of stress and downtime for an entire shared server and all the sites on it (which includes www.coasterclub.org, www.themeparks.ie, and www.ratscoasters.co.uk amongst others) ,all caused by one little crawler indexing just one site…

I only changed the robots.txt to exclude the “gigabot” once I worked out that was the cause of the huge increase in traffic - however it appears that their robot doesn’t re-read the robots.txt very often (if at all). First symptoms were in my photo gallery, which displays the last viewed images at the bottom of the page - I noticed something was hitting multiple galleries very fast. At the time I assumed someone was downloading my photo galleries - but it was gigabot trawling and retrawling the same pages over and over again.

Gigablast - you should be ashamed of yourselves, this is tantamount to a denial of service attack! This little bug put so much load on my site that it brought the entire shared sever down in a very short time.

If you use Gigablast for your searches, please stop - it’s having a devastating effect on servers all over the net.

A young driver who was caught driving without his headlights on (and was subsequently found to have no license, insurance or MOT for the car) has been banned for driving for a year, and had 9 points for his license.

I wonder if they’ll still be on his license in 6 years time when he becomes eligible to apply for it…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/4289930.stm

A website devoted to finding those public examples of mis-use of the English Language…

http://www.englishniggles.org/

I have to apologise for the recent problems with the server which hosts this website - it;s out of my control, but it appears to be predictable - the guys who look after the server are aware of the problem and will hopefully have a solution soon…

As I mentioned in my previous post, over the weekend was the European Coaster Club trip to Alton Towers and Drayton Manor Park in Staffordshire.

However the fun started on Friday night - meeting up with James at our hotel and discovering that the bed had a “loose leg”. The receptionist provided a solution which made use of the hotels ample supply of Gideons Bibles to replace the broken leg!

The actual days at the park were a lot of fun - making plenty of new friends and seeing lots of familiar faces too. By far the highlight of the Alton day was our night-time exclusive ride session on “Rita - Queen of Speed” - their new coaster - we were the first group to have an exclusive session on the ride, and we were the first people to ever ride it after dark. At the end of the evening, the ride operations and engineering staff took the opportunity to ride in the dark themselves!

Altons hospitality was outstanding, even laying on courtesy coaches back to the car-park following the ERS!

Day Two of the trip was another bright and early start, this time at Drayton Manor for their new coaster “G-Force” - which is the strangest looking ride I’ve seen in many years - with it’s “up and over” lifthill “loop” - however it’s a cracking little ride, and made an excellent finale to the trip as we finished the day with it. Also during the day, James was “introduced” to Apocalypse, and the fun of plummetting 200ft straight down… while standing up - and Drayton server us with the customary lunch, which consited of a full, 3 course Sunday Lunch - no burgers and chips here - this was “proper” food on plates with cutlery!

A good weekend - and I’m now back at work feeling very very tired!

Just back from an excellent weekend with the European Coaster Club at Alton Towers and Drayton Manor park - I’ll write more later in the week…

Suffice to say, James (on the front row in the picture, along with Paul) has now made a step towards conquering his fear of tower rides - having now ridden Apocalypse (Drayton Manor) several times.

It was good to see some old friends again, along with making some new ones too!

Photo Gallery is now online

A student bound for his first year at university hit on a unique idea for raising money to pay for his tuition and expenses at Uni - selling advertising space on his website.

This is not the normal selling advertising space though - he’s divided his homepage into 100 pixel “blocks” (10×10) each - and each block is sold for $100. So far he’s sold over 1000 of these blocks (100,000 pixels) - and this has netted him $100,000 to pay for his life for the next three years.

Oh, and he’s done this in less than a month. If only I could raise that kind of money that quickly.

Anyway can buy one or more blocks - and have their choice of image displayed.

http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com