Hi

AUTOLOGIN Some members reported problems with the login. After loggin in, the pages they saw did not reflect their current status (logged in) and still requested them to login. In all cases, a manual reload of the page solved the problem. Nevertheless it was a very irritating experience caused by the caching of pages by their browser. One way to solve this problem would have been to disable the caching of all pages, but that would have caused unnecessary reloads.

I worked out a different solution. You can set cookies on your system containing member name and password. Once these cookies are set, you will not have to login again ever. As soon as you access any page at www.webtruck.org, you will be logged in automagically.

Set your login cookies with this link: http://www.webtruck.org/util/pwcookieset_html

If you happen to set wrong login information, the cookie will be deleted by the server, so there's no problem if you spell something wrong.

If you want to delete the cookies, just go to the same link and hit the delete button.

THROTTLE www.webtruck.org is running on Zope (www.zope.org). All the pages, even if it's just a simple picture, are composed by the server on demand. This is much more demanding for the server than the traditional web servers, where every page is a html file waiting to be downloaded. Normally this is no problem, and the average server load is < .2 Sometimes this is a big problem though, when users start to download the whole site using tools like WebStripper. The server had to take up to 3000 requests per second, making it unusable for every other user.

Several times I was blocking such requests manually. This solved the problem, but was no option for the long run, because I'm not always there and I do have better things to do :-)

So last Friday, when a student from a university in Ankara, Turkey started to mirror the whole site, I looked for a better solution.

The server www.webtruck.org you have access to is not the Zope server, but a normal apache server that forwards the request to the Zope server. Apache has very powerful modules to control various aspects of the server, and one of them is mod_throttle (http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_throttle/). With this module it very easy to set up limitations for the request rate. Now if the server gets more than one request/second for more than 2 minutes from one IP address, these requests will be blocked until the rate drops.

So far no surfer using a browser has hit this limit - most of them use less than 10% of this rate, even if they drive the green truck like mad :-) Should you ever hit the limit and get the error message http://www.webtruck.org/E503_html just wait a minute or two to cool things down and everything will be back to normal.

If you'd like to mirror the site to read it offline, you can do so, just make sure you request no more than 1 page per second and exclude /sitemap_html.

EMAIL in my last email I notified you that some of the members got infected by a virus. You can avoid this by using your webtruck email address. All email going to @webtruck.org will be scanned and then forwareded to . Executables, video and audio files won't be accepted. If the mail server finds a virus or refuses the mail due to multimedia content or executables, both sender and you will receive a notice.

Spam will also be refused, using 3 black hole filters: http://www.ordb.org http://www.osirusoft.com http://www.dorkslayers.com

They run lists of open mail relays known to have been abused to send spam, any mail from one of these relays will be refused. Currently about 2% of all incoming mails are filtered out, and none of my clients has ever complained about not getting any wanted emails :-)

If you know of any spam filter based on content running und linux/sendmail please let me know

WebTruck