Every wondered how often your site gets scanned?

I run a demo instance of Atomic Lab’s Pion at home that I use for customer demonstrations and generally playing around.

I have been looking recently at the visitor session replay functionality and it’s fascinating to see how many people are out there just randomly scanning for vulnerabilities.

If we drill down into the headers we can see that in many cases the requests have spoofed headers, IP addresses etc

GET http://www.eduju.com/proxyheader.php HTTP/1.1
Host: www.eduju.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: zh-cn
Connection: Keep-Alive

The other common request string appears to be:

GET http://58.218.199.147:7182/judge.php HTTP/1.1

All of these requests use up your server resources, but standard analytics won’t show them up, so network-level analytics like Pion are the way to go!

Comments

Alexa has performance rankings too!

I must confess that this one had slipped past me… I wasn’t aware that Alexa was now offering performance rankings as well! Alexa now shows an “average load time” as well as a “comparitive ranking” (i.e. 51% of sites are slower). Interesting data for your next website analysis! It’s worth noting that the quoted “1.404 seconds” is about the same as the “repeat view” measurement webpagetest.org (testing from the UK node shows that www.johnlewis.com takes about 7.2 seconds to load with an empty cache, and 1.6 seconds with a primed cache, median values over 5 runs). Presumably this is an average across all Alexa toolbar users, on all johnlewis.com pages (large and small) with empty and primed caches.

Real-time Web Analytics just took a step forward with Pion v4

Awesome news from Atomic Lab’s that Pion 4.0 has been released! The new Dashboard functionality looks amazing – real-time web analytics likes page views, visitor sessions etc as well as performance analytics like load time and server reply time – along with the usual Pion goodness like tag-free analytics and customer journey visualisation with the Replay feature. Can’t wait to implement this on some customer sites!

Time Sync on SBS 2008

I had a small problem that has been bugging me re time sync on my home PC’s. The underlying problem was that the time sync on my Small Business Server 2008 (SBS 2008) server was drifting from the external time source (time.microsoft.com). The root cause was that I hadn’t opened UDP port 123 on my firewall to allow NTP traffic to my server. A quick firewall change and a w32tm /resync and everything was working correctly again. More instructions can be found here - http://www.smallbizserver.net/Articles/tabid/266/Id/71/How-to-fix-time-synchronization-errors.aspx

The Operations Manager

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