Ain’t nuthin’s ever easy
Some sort of crisis is forcing the gal who does my hair, Louise Marie, to change the software she uses for her online store.
Wouldn’t you know it that the first e-commerce site I’m seriously working on is a Canadian company selling mainly to the US, but also to Europe. This requires conversion among four currencies (CDN$, US$, , ) and localization in four languages, (English, French, German, Spanish). And between different products, colors, sizes, etc., we’re looking at almost 4,000 inventory items.
This is on top of putting the libraries of two different Presbyteries online along with a local realty and rental firm, two churches, a GLBT employee group for a Fortune 500 company and who know what else I’ve let slip between the cracks.
I spent the weekend and the early part of the week trying to track down a huge increase in server traffic. I was convinced the server had been “rooted” or that spammers found some sort of back door to do their dastardly deeds.
Problem is that there was nothing untoward in the system log or the messages log. Tracking down stuff in qmail (the mail server application) is a black art in itself. Further, since each hosting client has their own traffic log and statistics, there’s no single place I can go to examine web traffic.
I even had Web Boy over here spelunking around. That was most distracting 
Anyway, it turned out that one hosting client had submitted an image to a contest and won. That single image was hit for about 1.5 GB per day for four days running. Good news for him indeed. With 500 GB per month available to me, it’s not like there are going to be financial implications for either me or the client. My concern was possible nefarious activities taking place on my server.
In the end, I learned I already had things locked-down pretty tight and I learned a couple of new traffic and security utilities. And this time, it was Web Boy who said, “We’re so much alike it’s freaky.”
Meanwhile, the rest of the week, the weekend and the first part of next week are booked solid. That overwhelmed feeling is creeping up again.
