[CentOS] Am I being to paranoid?

Sun May 8 19:15:50 UTC 2011
Jason <slackmoehrle.lists at gmail.com>

Robert,

> > 1. Am I being to paranoid by doing this? My logic is they dont belong here and I could get mad if someone walked up to my apartment and tried jiggling the door handle to see if it was unlocked. 
> 
> Well, yes. There is a simplier way -- Apache does have an 'error page'
> handler, where you can customize your 404 page or how Apache responds
> to a 'page not found' error. Doing the redirect is not really going to
> solve anything anyway. Most (all?) of these accesses are from a
> program -- a kind of 'bad' robot, which is probably going to ignore the
> 301 status and come to the conclusion that these URIs are actually
> working and report success to its (human) master. That will open you
> up for more (automated) attacks and/or piss off the human hacker, who
> will just come up with more and nastier attacks or maybe just launch a
> dos attack for spite. You are better off just letting Apache handle
> these as 404. Imagine you have a storefront and people come by after
> hours and see the lights off and the closed sign -- people will go away
> and come back later. Imagine that the lights are on and there is no
> closed sign, and instead you have some poor clerk there answering the
> door telling people to go away. That is likely to cause more trouble,
> since people will just come back in 5-10 minutes and ask if the store
> is open now. Or worse, wait around until there is some indication that
> the store is open.
This is a good analogy. It does open up more to stating: "Damn'd if you do, damn'd if you dont". 
> > 4. Why does LogWatch show this to me as a 404 , when a rewrite rule is hit and they are re-directed back to themselves? My rules seem to be working, if I try and hit /scripts right now, it does what I expect. 
> 
> Question: are you using virtual hosts? If so, they the 'visitors' are
> either NOT sending HTTP 1.1 headers or not using the virtual host name.
Yes, I am and I have a few domains on this box. Each <virtual> has an include to a file that stores my rewrite rules so I just maintain them in a single place.

-Jason