The server damned near went down again, this time for the same reason as last: Someone out there thinks Mari’s site needs to be comment-spammed hard, fast and continuously. It’s not the spam itself that kills us, but rather the Perl threads and drive activity associated with the spamflooding.

I’ve taken some steps. For instance, commenting no longer takes place in a separate comment window. (There’s a geeky reason for that I won’t go into. Security through obscurity, or some-such.) We’ll see how effective they are, and for how long.

If this doesn’t work I’ll have to either turn off her comments or switch her to the comment script the rest of us are using. I’m averse to that solution mainly because she’ll lose all existing comments for good, and also because I don’t know if our comment system can survive a concerted attempt at spamming. I’m not in what you’d call a great big hurry to find out, you know?

Argh. Spammers die. Grrr.

As I’m gearing up for what I expect to be another one-pick-goes year of The Dead Pool, I decided to sign up for the Celebrity Death Beeper. Now, I’m not the most superstitious person I know, but this has to be a good sign:

Welcome to the Celebrity Death Beeper family!
You are family member #11,711.

Whoah, Nelly! That’s not only a bunch of lucky numbers, but it’s also a palindrome! This must be my year.

Right? *cough, cough* Right?

While I was waiting for something to break (I didn’t have to wait that long, it turns out, as the crappy DOS-based log-handling software our Traffic department uses has up and decided to hate running under WinXP), I upgraded my Linux workstation from Fedora Core 2 to Fedora Core 3.

You know what? It worked almost flawlessly. I only had to do a bit of apt-get patch-and-fill to make all the quirks go away, and most of the quirks were my own doing anyway. Wow.

So, at least something went right today…

Now that the new server has stabilized, and now that I’ve switched from the not-updated-since-August-2003 Analog to the bright and new AWStats for website reporting, I can relax and do fun things like dig through this month’s search queries for nuggets of bloggy goodness.

The anime site is generating its fair share of traffic, especially from fans of Popotan, Stellvia, Bottle Fairy and Mai Hime. Oddly enough, nobody used any inappropriate search phrases in that category this time around. (Whew.)

I can’t say the same about whoever found me by searching for “peter pan slash fiction.” Ewww. Just, ewww. Oh, and if you’re searching for “google” on Google, you need professional help. And the less said about “penis sizes for a 15 year old,” the better.

I’m surprised that the “Sorry Everybody” site (scroll down if you’re that curious, though one would think everyone’s seen it by now) generated so much traffic to this page. I mean, it’s not like people come here for compelling spiffy new meme-like stuff. But hey, whatever works. I even earned a couple of semi-spammy comments from it.

One wonders what spurs someone to search for “mormon tractor trailer rig.” Hmm.

I don’t know if I can help you “troubleshoot pumpkin pie not set up,” but if you give me said pumpkin pie I’ll be willing to give it a taste. Er, try. *cough*

Workplace entries, particularly personality-specific posts, generate some traffic. People still want to know about Marconi and Tiny, and wonder if I have any new anecdotes about Daria O’Neil, and so on. The answer in both cases is “no,” which is fortunate or unfortunate depending on your point of view.

And for the very, very small handful of you who were looking for the Tenchi Muyo Thumbnail Theater and the Past, Present, Future archives… all I can say is, if you’ll pardon the phrase, “Sorry everybody!”

More bullet-points from the field of battle:

• First I had to add shell info to each of the user accounts before FTP would work. Then I had to tell ProFTPd where it could go stick its notion of defaulting to a chroot home directory login for all users. On account of this, RDS info for many of our stations’ websites was nonexistent until midday. Argh.
• The default Apache config file in Fedora Core 3 is set not to run CGI scripts. Um, what? (This broke Mari’s and Dawn’s sites. Argh.)
• The upgrade to a newer version of PHP somehow managed to leave our comments script mysteriously broken. Luckily someone posted a simple and effective fix on the dotcomments support group. Whew. I’d never have figured that one out on my own.
• While trying to solve the previous mystery, I discovered that ‘jhead’ was missing on the server. This is a JPEG header information program that Gallery uses… and we have Gallery installed a few times on this server, donchaknow.

I’m sure there’ll be more. There’s no way I can be allowed to get more than three consecutive hours of sleep, after all…