One aspect of yesterday's problem is a littleordering issue between /etc/inittab and stuff in /etc/rc.d . Namely:

Everything in /etc/rc.d runs before other things in /etc/inittab really takes effect.

(The paths here are for Red Hat; elsewhere, what Red Hat puts in /etc/rc.d is just put straight into /etc , so you have /etc/init.d and /etc/rc3.d and so on

One quiet sysadmin nightmare is discovering that you don't know howto reproduce the running setup on a system that you've taken over.You know, things like: there's nothing that seems to start importantprograms; programs that the configuration seems to say should be runningaren't (or aren't running successfully); programs are running as UIDsthat aren't even in /etc/passwd .

I spent part of today mostly dispelling a nightmare like that, andtherein lies a tale

It's very simple: put what should be in your User-Agent header intothe Referer header instead. The next time I read my Referer logs,you're sure to provoke me into spasms of teeth-grinding irritation.I can only conclude that people pulling this stunt are attemptingadvertising through other people's public Referer logs.

(For bonus points, fetch my syndication feeds without any attemptat conditional GET .)

Today's offender is the 'Strategic Board Bot', run by strategicboard.