This january, my girlfriend Janneke and I will revisit the site of Koroneia to do a thorough topographical study of the hill it lies on. In order to do so, we’ll get to play with the faculties newest, 5-digit pricetag, powertoy: a TopCon differential GPS set. With it, we hope to be able to create a highly precise 3D elevation model. Assuming at least some of the slopes and terraces we see on the hill today were also there in ancient times, these must’ve shaped, and also been shaped by, the city on top of it. As such we hope to be able to learn more about the city’s layout, which started with a number of insights during the survey last summer.
Return to Koroneia
December 12th, 2007Apache blackhole
December 12th, 2007This tip helps limit the server resources (CPU and bandwidth) taken by worms, probes and misconfigurations hitting your Apache webserver. I’m assuming you already have virtual hosting and mod_rewrite enabled (most sites do).
Generally, requests to the server without a valid server hostname (like www.yourserver.com) will be answered by the topmost entry in your vhost configuration. In almost all cases, this will be either a worm just connecting to your IP-address directly without knowing which sites you run, or a DNS misconfiguration of someone else has sent an unwitting user to your doorstep. In both cases, serving out your ‘default’ website is pointless. You don’t want the worm to probe around your site looking for vulnerabilities and if it really is a misdirected user, they’re not likely to be interested in your default site.
My solution is to create a default site that isn’t actually a site, but rather a short, simple message saying that the web address entered (if any) is wrong. This can simply be done by adding the following vhost entry at the top of the vhost configuration (in the case of apache2: in the file ‘default’ in /sites-available), just below “NameVirtualHost *”:
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName nohost
ErrorDocument 403 "The website you requested was not found on this server"
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule . - [F]
</VirtualHost>
Second server
December 12th, 2007Joeri and I are looking to make the next step up in the MMVI project by adding a second server. This will give us some redundancy to prevent outages and also a lot more bandwidth so that we can hopefully put everything online that we always wanted to.
Initially we intended to build the second server ourselves (like the previous one) from used hardware. However, some very tempting offers from Dell have made us reconsider. It turns out that we can get a new, Dell-assembled and -tested machine for relatively little extra money. We’re now looking at different hosts, aiming as high as 1 TB (terabyte) of allowed data transfer per month.