Abdussamad's blogspace

I have a centos 4.5 powered VPS that was running out of memory at peak times and so I decided to take a look at using squid to reverse proxy apache. When squid is used as a reverse proxy all http requests are proxied through squid to apache. The advantage of this setup is:

Most websites on the Internet can be accessed using both just their domain name and the www subdomain and domain name. For ex: www.example.com and example.com may lead to the same website. Some search engines consider the www version and the non-www version to be seperate websites and assign different Search Engine Results Page (SERP) positions and or page rank to them. This often results in a split page rank where the non-www and www versions of a site have different page rank. To prevent something like this from happening it helps to canonicalize your website URL. This means that you should select one version as a standard and redirect from the other to it.

It is often neccessary for a web master to transfer files from one site to another. Whether it be to install open source software or to move a site, the ability to transfer a file directly from one web server to another can be a real time saver. This is where this PHP script comes into play. Once uploaded onto the destination server it should be accessed using your browser. It will display a form in which you can enter the details of the source file and server and it will download the file directly from the source file server onto your server.

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Download sst-2.1-php.zip

Recently I have been buying a lot of domain names for resale and I have had to provide contact information that is publicly accessible in the whois database. This database is widely used by spammers to harvest email addresses. But I figured out a way to make my email address public whilst limiting the number of spammers that harvest it. The key is to create an email address with the words "nospam" in it.

The idea behind this is simple. Lots of users disguise their real email addresses by adding nospam to it. Then they instruct their friends to remove nospam before using their email address. In fact this technique is so common that spam software has adapted to it and it automatically removes "nospam" from any email address that contains it. So by creating an email address that does contain "nospam" in it you are fooling spammers into using the wrong address. For example my domains carry the email address domain-nospam@abdussamad.com . Spam bots harvest it as domain-@abdussamad.com which is non-existent. Of course I do remind humans that the email address is to be used without modification by making that clear in a note in the address field. How well has this technique worked? In more than a month since making this email address public I have recieved only two spam messages. In my book thats not too bad.

A cron job is a command that will run at a scheduled time. My website host allows me to set up cron jobs through the CPanel interface. Now I know I can use the serendipity backup plugin to do this but it only backups up the database to a directory on the server. IMO this does not serve much purpose since a backup should always be placed on a different system to the one being backed up. I think a simple approach is to email myself the backup. So I use a cron job to backup my database. Its a series of piped commands: