Linux HowTo: Defeating referer spam

January 24, 2006 - Filed in Linux HowTos by Felix

Everytime you visit a website, your browser also sends the URL of the previous page to the server you are accessing. In default configuration, Apache does save that information to the logfiles. This information can then be used by logfile analyzing tools such as Webalizer to create statistics of which pages most of your visitors came from.

Yesterday I noticed that someone was massively accessing our server and submitting referer URLs like

http://www.site-full-of-adverts.tld/cheap_pills.php
http://www.site-full-of-adverts.tld/free_download.php
Read the rest of this post »

Linux HowTo: How to recompress daily SQL database dumps to 0.8% of their size

January 23, 2006 - Filed in Linux HowTos by Felix

I have a cron job installed on the office server, that is using mysqldump to create a full database backup every day. The script adds a timestamp into the filename and compresses the output via gzip to save some space. Read the rest of this post »