Category: grayblog.co.uk

Well, I seem to have conquered the worm, with no new problems with it. I do still seem to be eating bandwidth though, and I’m not sure why – 0.9GB since yesterday tea-time compared with around 2.5GB for a whole month recently. So I’ve set robots.txt to prevent bots from looking for files that no longer exist (thereby creating an unwanted 404), although I can’t believe that that is the whole problem.
Thank goodness I checked my Hotmail and picked up on the warning from 34sp that I’d exceeded my bandwidth allowance, otherwise the bill would be spiralling out of control by now. There must be other people who haven’t checked their mail over the Christmas period who will be in for a shock when they next log in.

I’ve just received a traffic warning from 34sp – it seems that I’ve had more than 9GB of traffic this month compared with my limit of 3GB, and so should expect a bill for about £9. Hmm.
Would backing up my databases in two formats (two enormous files) have caused this? Previously, my traffic had been around 2GB and increasing by about 10% per month.

EDIT: looks like the Santy C worm. I’m working on a block.
FURTHER EDIT: this site is under attack. If you use WP or any other PHP script, you need to protect NOW. Go here.
YET FURTHER EDIT: I’ve implemented the .htaccess edit recommended by "thepete" in the forum linked above. I’ll monitor it tomorrow and see what has happened. I think that WP has blocked all the bot requests but has served a lot of 404s. I also seem to have been serving an enormous number of 404s to bots that have been looking through my old MT archive files (so, if you have links to my old MT generated pages, they will no longer work as they have been purged). I’ll keep you posted.
EDIT THE FOURTH: the edit of the .htaccess file has not worked. I’ve had more than 2GB of bandwidth eaten last night. So I’ve added some lines to the top of my index.php file as recommended in the first post in the forum thread linked to above. I’m really keen to fix this, as every GB of bandwidth costs me £1.50 and the money is being eaten at a frightening rate, so any suggestions are welcome! I’ll report back on the success or otherwise of the latest change.
EDIT THE FIFTH: the latest attempt seems to have worked completely, and my bandwidth consumption has dropped dramatically. Hurrah!

Everyone seems to be caught up in Best Ofs and Top 100s at the moment. Not one to be left out, and lacking ideas for original content at the moment, I felt that it was time to have some Best Bits of …grayblog… 2004, just in time for this site’s fifth Christmas.

Best Game of 2004
Top Dog – originally posted 13 December. Without doubt, the game that I played most this year.

Best Amusing Link (not game) of 2004
Making Fiends – episode 11– originally posted 13 September. The Making Fiends series has been consistently brilliant, and this was probably the best of them all.

Favourite Political Rant of 2004
Howard’s Wrong Way – originally posted 6 October. Apart from the Boris bit at the end, I think most of what I said still holds true (in fact, the Boris bit actually illustrates what I said about trust).

Best photograph of 2004
Tempted as I was by this one, I eventually decided on this one instead:

– originally posted 4 November 2004. This picture has lots of memories for us both. I’m going to try and take more photos for this site in 2005.

Best cat named after me
Graybo the Cat at Uborka.

Any suggestions for other categories?

Hmm. For some reason, WordPress seems to have stopped notifying me when new comments are posted here. I’ve checked all the admin settings, and it is all set to notify me at my usual address. I’ve also checked my spam settings to ensure that the emails are not being killed. Any ideas?

There is a bug in versions of WordPress above 1.2 which could result in you or a user unintentionally (or intentionally) causing your site to crash. There is a simple fix here. I think it has been sufficiently well-publicised now that we need not be secretive about it – just tell any WP users that you know that they need to implement the fix as soon as possible.

Thanks to Ian for the tip-off, I’ve now installed Kitten’s Spaminator. Let’s see if it effectively kills off the spam comments.
If you have a problem posting a comment, let me know by e-mail and I’ll see what (if anything) I can do.

It looks like the spam commenter has returned – 15 this morning, so he’s clearly got a workaround for the anti-spam measures I took. I’ll have to look into some of the other anti-spam measures available to me.