This week, we:

• got 12,289 messages from 220 different IP addresses.
• handled 18,265 sessions from 954 different IP addresses.
• received 143,889 connections from at least 48,413 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 14 connections being checked at once.

Session volume is up slightly from last week ,but everything else is down. The per day table is relatively boring, soI'm omitting it

I've come to realize that I have a two-part wish about web robots andspiders and so on. To wit:

I wish that there was something that all robots put in the HTTP requestheaders (perhaps having 'ROBOT' somewhere in their User-Agent string),and then that there was a standard HTTP response code for 'requestdeclined because robots should not crawl this resource'.

Part of the problems of dealing with (well behaved) robots is that theonly real robot signature is fetching

A co-worker recently came to me with an interesting and mysteriousproblem. He was setting up a Red Hat Enterprise 4 based machine withMySQL, using a default setup except he'd changed the location of MySQL'sdata directory from /var to a different partition. Now MySQL wasn'tstarting properly.

The symptoms were really funny: the init.d script installed by thesystem didn't work, except if he ran it by hand with ' sh -x ', it did.So