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                        Oddities found on a webserver

I've been hired to admin a few webservers. Not a lot of money, but the intent
is to get them running smoothly by themselves and just collect money from
month to month (but I do have to respond to emergency situations but I get
extra for that).

So I spent today poking around the servers, getting a feel for how they're
set up, what the typical load is, and how set things up so they run
themselves. I'm looking through the error log file (it runs Apache [1]) when
I notice the following:

> [Tue Nov 18 16:28:19 2003] [info] server seems busy, (you may need to
> increase StartServers, or Min/MaxSpareServers), spawning 8 children, there
> are 0 idle, and 18 total children
>

First off, that tells me their web server configuration could use some
tweaking, but secondly, I've never seen that error! That is quite neat
actually.

Secondly, since this is a rather busy webserver, I'm seeing all sorts of web
based attacks hitting the servers, stuff I've never seen before, which makes
this interesting (in an academic sort of way—as a practical matter it's
annoying). And some stuff that is just outright puzzling.

But if anything, it should prove to be an interesting job.

[1] http://httpd.apache.org/

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