Mexican hookers damn near killed my server

Sunday, January 27, 2008, 12:39 AM
Thoughts by John

Some days you really wonder exactly how bad and strange these internets can get. Mexican hookers took down my web server. How? With their womanly wiles? Not quite.

I'm still trying to figure out which of two possibilities happened.

Scenario #1: GoDaddy assigned my new virtual dedicated Linux web server an IP address that was formerly used by a website, solid-girls.com, a website for finding and contacting... wait for it... 'exclusive Mexican escorts'.

Advertisements

Scenario #2: This ultra-spammy dude, who according to DomainTools.com (great website, BTW) is an Alex Vazquez of Houston, Texas, either cannot type or cannot remember what the IP address of five of his websites is.

Whatever the case, requests for this website and related websites from Vazquez hit my server literally non-stop, virtually all originating from three addresses in Montevideo, Mexico my server slowed to a halt and finally died so badly that it took a while just to issue a reboot command. The Mexican hookers took down my server and many of my websites!

Since the name server, arematar.com, also resolves to this IP address -- MY friggin IP address, mind you -- I'm thinking scenario #1 is more likely.

According to the Wayback Machine, these websites were all spammy as hell. Oddly, only one got a PageRank of 0 from Google, and that was solid-girls.com. I think the others didn't even stay on the web long enough to earn a PR of 0. And all of them were last recorded on the web in July 2007. And almost all of their copyright dates are from 2005.

Yuppers... Alex sure was busting his hump to keep them there domains on the interwebs, wasn't he?

So, it sounds like GoDaddy let scenario #1 happen.

Whatever the case, I did what any sane person would do. I put placeholder pages on the server for each of the websites with insulting language (in two languages, no less!) about Alex's failure to handle his websites properly and Google Adsense ads, too.

On the upside, since the name server resolves to my IP, I can keep watching the denial logging from named and see if I can't add even more insulting placeholders on even more websites.

Some days ya wonder... all I wanted to do was sit down and work on my PDFtoHTML project for an upcoming client meeting this week.

Oh, well.

Mail article to a friend

Tools

Check Google PageRank

Recent articles

Welcome!

Wonder where to start with your web design business?

This blog follows along with my efforts to build and grow a website design business, Pro Content and Design.

The goal of this blog is to fill in blanks that may be empty as you get your business rolling.

This blog, particularly the source code section, is not intended for beginners. If you are not comfortable with databases, Ajax, DOM objects and other advanced methods, I strongly suggest you go take a look over at W3 Schools before even reading -- let alone tinkering with -- any of the code here.

I hope this blog has some value to web designers as they attempt to get their businesses going.

Good luck, and happy reading.

Thank you,
John Crawford
Pro Content and Design