I spent the whole day basically tracing one bug. It was to do with shadow flicking and it was getting on my tits. Walked the dog. Still bug hunting. Went for a run. Came back to a FaceBook message, a message on my mobile and a message on the home phone, all from my mother. All asking for the password to log into her email. It’s all setup and doesn’t actually require one. So I tried to log into my own email and got an authorisation error. So a bit of digging. I finally managed to log into my Ubuntu box and reboot it. It took bloody ages to start up and then was slow as hell, still no email. Rebooted it. Web server came back up but that was about all. Managed to copy the syslog across to my PC. It did a kernel panic at about 6PM, ran out of memory. After the reboot I did a process list and there were an absolute shit load of apache services firing up. This looked highly suspect. I killed apache, then started digging more. I thought I was getting a denial of service attack, so added a log to the firewall and sure enough there was an access a second from some external site which was trying to randomly access my site. Every access would spawn a new apache server service and eventually it would go pop. So blocked the IP on the firewall. Restarted apache but it still needed another reboot to get it all back together. I think I need to limit the amount of services it can fire up. But that’s a job for another day. Or may be I should stick some more memory in it.

Then the plumber man turned up. He was fine, young chap, made vague notes, I’m sure he will give me an even vaguer quote. Finally traced and fixed the bug. I do need to twiddle it a bit more though, at least I know where it came from now.

Wine o’clock.