-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to gemini.conman.org:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini
It's not only Gemini bots having issues with redirects [1]. I'm poking around the logs from my webserver, when I scan all of them to see the breakdown of response codes my server is sending (for this month). And well … it's rather surprising:
Table: Breakdown of HTTP response codes from all the sites I host Status Meaning Count ------------------------------ 302 Found (moved temporarily) 253773 200 OK 178414 304 Not Modified 25552 404 Not Found 8214 301 Moved Permanently 6358 405 Method Not Allowed 1453 410 Gone 685 400 Bad Request 255 206 Partial Content 151 401 Unauthorized 48 500 Internal Server Error 24 403 Forbidden 4 ------------------------------ Status Meaning Count
I was not expecting that many temporary redirects. Was it some massive issue across all the sites? Or just a few? Well, it turned all of the temporary redirects were from one site: http://www.flummux.org/ (and no, I'm not linking to it as the reason why will become clear). I registered the domain way back in 2000 just as a place to play around with web stuff or to temporarly make files available without cluttering up my main websites. The site isn't meant to be at all serious.
Scanning the log file manually, I was seeing endless log entries like:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX - - [10/Apr/2022:20:55:05 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 302 284 "http://flummux.org/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; MRA 4.6 (build 01425); .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)" -/- (-%)
That log entry indicates a “browser” from IP (Internet Protocol) address XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, identifying itself as “Mozilla (yada yada)” on the 10^th of April, attempted to get the main page, as referred by http://flummux.org/. And for how many times this happened, broken down by browser:
Table: Top five user agents making the troublesome requests Count User agent ------------------------------ 127100 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; MRA 4.6 (build 01425); .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 126495 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E) 42 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.97 Safari/537.36 36 CATExplorador/1.0beta (sistemes at domini dot cat; https://domini.cat/catexplorador/) 15 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:94.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/94.0
Ah, two “browsers” that don't limit the number of redirects they follow. And amusingly enough, both agents came from the same IP address. Or maybe it's the same agent, just lying about what it is. Who knows? Well, aside from the author(s) of said “browser.”
But what was all horribly confusing to me why the server was issuing a temporary redirect. Yes, if you try to go to http://flummux.org/ the server will repond with a permanent redirect (status 301) to http://www.flummux.org/ (the reasons for that is to canonicalize the URL (Uniform Resource Locator)s and avoid the “duplicate content penalty” from Google—I set this all up years ago). But the site shouldn't redirect again. I can bring the site up in my browser without issue (which is a visual … pun? Commentary? Joke? on the line “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”).
And then I remembered—back in 2016, I set things up such that if the browser sent in a referring link, the page would temporarily redirect back to the referring link (which is why I'm not linking to it—you would just be redirected right back to this page). I set that up on a lark for some reason that now esacapes me. So the above “browsers” kept bouncing back and forth between flummux.org and www.flummux.org. For a quarter of a million requests.
Sigh.
In other news, bugs are nothing more than an inattention to detail.
-- Response ended
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