What a week...

My server got hacked or a DNS entry go hosed somewhere but starting about Wednesday my little mini that could started processing between 600 and 1000 hits a second. Looking for adverts. What is really strange is that my Apache instance was returning 200 instead of 404. I asked around and several people told me I needed to reformat and rebuild the server. So I shut down on Wednesday night around 5:00pm and rebuilt on Thursday. After rebuilding everything I turned the web service back on (i.e. started apache) and what do you know my hit count shot up to 300 to 600 hits a second. Arg..

So then I stared looking elsewhere for the issue and thanks to my responsive hosting provider I got switched to a new IP. Everything went back to normal. So it looks to me (though I'm no expert) like DNS was hosed somewhere which was routing those request to me. What I never understood was why was apache (after a fresh reformat, reinstall) responding with a 200 for URL's that clearly did not belong to my server. If anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them.

So almost everything is back to normal now. There are still problems with mail but I hope to get that sorted out shortly.