Savannah W-ITS

For me, these pre-date a popular US TV show (NCIS – ‘the rules’ referred to – connected to the character, ‘Gibbs’.)  The first three get the most mileage.  BTW – SA=SE (from my chair, sys-admin = systems engineer ~ anyone working on your IT infrastructure.)

You will do no harm – nothing you do will negatively [...]

First!  Hat’s Off to the folks working the Wordpress solution – using it has been a great experience with few problems.    I have several Wordpress installs on multiple domains (happy consumer!) so my main interests in the new release includes:

managing/running all sites from one install on a single server
simplifying management of updates/plugins/themes
sharing custom [...]

NOS = not open source; but there is a ‘free’ version…  Before diving in some attractive verbiage from Wikipedia:
Splunk[1][2][3] is a search, monitoring and reporting tool for IT system administrators with search capabilities[4]. It crawls logs, metrics, and other data from applications, servers and network devices and indexes it in a searchable repository from which [...]

You should expect that your data will be somewhat different – after reviewing some log data here is what I am seeing for the past 12 months or so – note caveats:

this post is not about how to thwart hackers/spammers/miscreants – it is a simple GEO-centric review – where are the ‘bad guys’ coming from?
numbers [...]

Some recent events illustrate current, seemingly innocuous examples of personal data collection. You don’t know or can’t imagine this being a problem – but it could be.   Examples:

Any commercial web site (where a product is being sold and data about your ‘web visit’ is being collected and maintained.)
Facebook privacy & security policies and practices.
Google Maps [...]

Link/Referrer SPAM: For some reason this seems to have started in early 2010 (or at least that is when I first noticed it.)  When reviewing server logs I was seeing strange links to my site (the referrer domains had no connection to the site content – they made no/little sense.)

The links only read a [...]

©: Can you use content (text, images, other media) from other sites on the web, i.e. copy the content into your web page, blog post or other web resource?
** In very general terms you should only use your own content on your web site(s).  When using content from other resources you need to limit your [...]

This is part three of a multi-part post on generating KML data from server logs.
In this KML data (an XML data structure)  created via scripts similar to the example in the last post are used to generate a file of Geo IP nodes which will be read (dynamically) to create a map. The objective is [...]

I previously posted about using the mod_geoip Apache module to control web access via .htaccess files or server configuration adjustments (i.e. editing httpd.conf.)   Here we are adding the mod_security Apache module into the mix.
Wait!  if we can control access via mod_geoip why do we need mod_security?
The simple answer is….  you don’t need it – but [...]

This is part two of a multi-part post on generating KML data from server logs.
In this post examples of KML data (an XML data structure) are created via some simple shell functions using a ‘here documents‘.  The objective is to create a basic map using Geo IP data showing connections from a  remote system to [...]