[SGVLUG] Fun of running a Website.

[Emerson, Tom]

> -----Original Message----- Of Michael Proctor-Smith
> 
> Yes The sgvlug site is down. I took it down because of an 
> attack. Well at least we got crawled by msn/yahoo/and someone 
> at texas A&M in the last three days(I was reading the logs).

Ummm... Crawling isn't an "attack" (that I know of) -- not honoring
robots.txt, however, might be an actionable offense (umm, you HAVE setup
an appropriate robots.txt file, haven't you?)

Msn, yahoo, google, and others will generally be grabbing/caching pages
for their search engines -- this is "a good thing" (right, Chris?)
unless there is a loop (and even if there was) these spiders shouldn't
be consuming huge amounts of bandwidth as they should hit each page and
move on.  I don't think they bother with images (well, save for google
for their google images search page -- do the others do the same now?)

That leaves the Texas A&M site -- could be someone did a wget?  Is there
any indication of attempts to exploit mambo/joomla?

For that matter, didn't Matthew G. install a java-based IRC client?
Could that have had "a side effect"?  (maybe that's why I couldn't
connect?)  Are we sure it's been configured correctly?