Had a great day ...

Lets leave out the summary and just get stuck in.

Few jobs I thought I would get on with yesterday. Starting point was to monitor if anybody is accessing my sites and given the nginx logs are growing fast something is, but difficult to see who. So what is available to parse the files? A quick search put GoAccess as the top option, so I tried to get a copy loaded since it's not in the basic openSUSE setup of packages, but it is on the experimental branch of Leap 15.6 which is useful. In minutes I had it producing static copies of the summary and it produces quite useful results. It was fairly obvious that on a couple of the sites there was a heavy crawl bot hit from a couple of different bots, so I've added one to the robots.txt file, but the second was not identified so it's IP address is now blocked. All very easy to process, but I will produce some notes for reference. Crib-sheets on rainbowdigitalmedia.uk I think ...

What I have not yet sorted out is how to make the server side of it work, but I've created a cron job that pushes the relevant static file to each website and getting that working so quickly was another success. Only running daily at the moment, or I can manually hit it when I want to check. Also as the log files are being archived to keep their size down, it does not have more than a few days worth of data. Next step there is to extend the time between log packing, or find a way to include the last uncompressed log with the current one. Something that should not be too difficult to do since the batch file I cloned as a base manipulates file names for the firebird backup process. But I've achieved the initial target and can use what I have to monitor crawler and other activity. It also confirms the volume of attempts at hacking the sites by looking for WordPress and other framework files, something bitweaver just shrugs off.

Being on a roll, the next step was to look again at replacing Plex. While it does an excellent job, it has too much baggage and it's reliance on 'phoning home' all the time gets irritating. I have just had to log in again just to get back where I was working. A quick search for alternatives turned up a new article on privacysavvy.com which looked interesting, although many of the 10 can be crossed off the list quite quickly, being windows based. I had already played with jellyfin before when I could not get access to the lifetime pass on the Plex account, but dropped it when that problem was solved. However now is the time to try again, and initial tests are actually quite impressive. Especially when I added the Calibre book library along side the music collection. There are parts that are missing that Plex supplies, but I had the desktop machine serving the mirror copy of the material that is on the main server in short order and used it to watch a couple of TV programs last night. Time to dig a bit deeper, but I suspect I will be switching the main server over in the next week!

Time to get on with the daily chores ... play more later.

OK, been over to the main block for a decent shower and hair wash, since I can't do that in my own flat. Half an hour doing the 'exercises' that the physio has given me to allegedly help with my knee problems. Doing them in time with some music makes it a bit easier, but a couple are still taxing 8 weeks in. The 'app' is next to useless and I only go in on the phone after completing them all. Fast complete tags that I've done them all. I don't see what use that is as it is not tracking anything and the NHS is paying for the 'service'! Still will keep it up for now. Next chore is my daily 'Brisk Walk' which the NHS exercise app nags me to complete ... still it gets me away from the computer for a while.