Did you ever think that your users were on the system to provide you with a clean good way of living your life? Think again. They mess things up. Even the most wellintended users mess things up from time to time. This time it was a poorly written webpage that took the entire webserver offline. It’s no good when your webpage spawns 40 apache-httpd-requests and 20-or-so mysql-requests to build ONE page. That’s what made Igloo kneel yesterday evening.

After getting the box online again, with a new kernel and doing some filesystemchecks I decided to investigate what made the horror evolve the way it did this morning. What I found made me rather shocked. The above mentioned webpage contains poorly written php wich calls mysql to print the pages. Fine, nerdehaven.no are also built with php and mysql, but this page does not kneel the server when a page is loaded twice in 10 seconds. The other page however, did just that. To avoid further services interuption we locked away the webpage by moving its content into a new folder and placing a “temporarily out of order”-page in its place. The owners of the page will be asked to clean up if they shall be allowed to return. To further avoid misconfigured webpages from kneeling the server we modified the Apache configuration some to allow fewer running children and a more rapid termination of stale children.

Now, on with the show. It’s partyday, so I put on my best tshirt, okay maybe not the best, but I enjoy the NUCCC-2004 tshirt. It’s size ‘L’ so I dont have to think of it being to large for my new me. We’re going out. Yes. Grep are having a little time off from the computer industry to rant about whatnot and whatelse. Warming up with a gocart race and some laser-gunfighting we’ll party until the cabs take us home sometime during the night.

The rest of you may not join but, I hear there’s a party at Samfundet tonight. It’s rather suspiciously named ‘klinfæst’ or ‘makeoutparty’ if you prefer the english name. Have fun.