A Day Off
That’s what this (yesterday, save draft) became, kinda, since there wasn’t much to do without a web server running. My Subversion respository is had through HTTPS, so I did feel comfortable working on code.
Watched a very silly movie with Veronica Lake on the TV.
Went into town. To the wrong Sweetwater’s Cafe to meet an Ed that wasn’t there.
Shopped for new hosting, half-heartedly, since I’ve spent the month working on getting my server just so. Got a feel for how much bandwidth really costs, when you really need it.
They are still asking for their afwul things through my web server, despite all the 404s. It only takes eight processes to turn them down now, though, not the 30+ needed this morning. I’m turning everything back on, and getting back to work.
Intrusion detection will be added to the many things I’ll have to know a little bit about. Or maybe it’s enough to have learned this lesson about Apache’s mod_proxy. My post-mortem tells me that I followed a convention learned from mod_rewrite, and thought that “ProxyRequests on” was analogous to “RewriteEngine on”. For rewrite it means “Yes, I’d like to use rewrite.” Unless switched, no rewrites for you. For proxy it means “Yes, I’ll do anything for anybody.”
Not sure why that option even exists. Have a new appreciation for the importance of choosing reasonable defaults.
I wish there was a way for me to feel confident about my knowledge about adminstrative things. Security and networking are different from programming. You have human opponents, natural selection, market forces, and chaos.
Perhaps, I’m due for some exposure. It was overwhelming this morning, but this evening I can see this as being part of the package. One that I’ve not concerned myself self with in my self-study and lonesome programming. Infinate, yet manageable.
That blackbox log, for example. That helped.