Found out that OS X server does something a little weird with logs. Turns out that 500.weekly ends up gzipping the httpd logs every saturday and creating a new log with root:admin as the user and group respectively. This means that apache can’t write to the log. Why this is the default is beyond me. Anyway, I changed the 500.weekly to create the new file with www:www instead and all is well in log land. I also set up a cron job to update awstats every hour so that it doesn’t matter if the logs get b0rked by something like this again.
Got a preliminary list of referrer spammers into a working .htaccess file with all of the spammers currently in the logs. We’ll see if it helps much. Most of the spammer’s sites are already pulled from their respective hosts, so I have a feeling even blacklisting won’t help a lot, but catch-alls for things like casino and poker should help at least some.
Also got the machine backed up in case something tragic happens. I have also decided that if the el-cheapo headless imac does come out at MacWorld, there is a pretty decent chance I will be getting 2 of them. In tooling around, I’ve realized that I really need a dev server in addition to the production server. There are a couple of things that I want to play around with, but I could end up breaking the server and don’t want to bring down the sites in the process. Dev servers are a really good idea. Also, it would serve as fallback server incase I had hardware issues with the main box. Please Apple.. please.
Speaking of the headless iMac, you can see somebody having fun with the mac rumor scene here. It not bad, but falls apart on close inspection. The top of it is an ibook with a piece of paper on it, and I’m tempted to believe it’s just 2 iBooks stacked on top of one another with a piece of tape or paper between them. You can even see the iBook vents on the back of it. The box is clearly fake with a lot of things wrong including fonts, orientation, images, wrong styrofoam, and a couple of other things. What other company’s fans go to these lengths?