Support Analyst’s Talk

Coming to this topic, I have to start from the email I got from dreamhost support team.

In their email, I was told that I am the heaviest user on the server where I host my site.  I was also told about most common IP Addresses for my domains. Eventually, by checking the IP address, I am able to identify the IP owner - Yahoo’s clawer which extremely frequently crawled my sites.

OK, to prevent gettting such mail from dreamhost again and also run our sites smoothly without any break down, I think it is quite helpful to know how to find out the causes of heavy usage by ourself.

There are basically two commends:

Enter this command to see the IPs hitting the domain the most:

cat access.log| awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n

and this command is even more useful in some cases as it specifically targets the last 10,000 hits:

tail -10000 access.log| awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n

After running these two commend , you will get something like: 

  .....

  .....
  612 122.152.128.16

  1277 38.99.13.124

  1806 66.94.237.140

  1806 66.94.237.141

  1823 66.94.237.142

From above result, I will need to write a fragement of code into .htaccess file to prevent the most commond  IP Addresses: 66.94.237.*

Order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from 66.94.237.

We are supporting a bunch of TV screens which displays a whole lot of campaigns. Those campaigns can be pictures, video clips, webpages and any other multi-midea files. These resources are streamed from pcs which runs software called Campaign Manager and connected with TV screens.

Recently business requires us to display some video,  however, the effect of Campaign Manager playing video directly is not satisfactory, so they want to try alternative method -  use Microsoft own product- Silverlight to play videos.

We have tested it on our Test PC today and it looks good.

Silverlight demo can be found here: http://www.silverlight.net/fox/