Question

I had a connection which started out in an ordinary way, but wound up involving 18000+ hits in about an hour and 40 minutes. Many of the the hits were as follows. (I've removed the originating address.)

What I don't know is whether there is some way to get things to go into a loop, or whether this person was "trying something on". I haven't tried to reproduce this yet.

Many of the the hits were as follows. (I've removed the originating address.)

xx.xx.xx.xx - - [23/Jan/2002:03:24:44 +0000] "GET /twiki/bin/view/TWiki/*SCRIPT
ULRPATH*/view/TWiki/TWikiRegistration HTTP/1.0" 400 291 "http://kant1.chch.ox.ac.uk/twiki/bin/rdiff/TWiki/TWikiAccessControl" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0
; Windows 98)"

xx.xx.xx.xx - - [23/Jan/2002:03:24:44 +0000] "GET /twiki/bin/view/TWiki/*SCRIPT
URLPATH*/view*SCRIPTSUFFIX*/*WEB*/*TOPIC*?raw=debug HTTP/1.0" 400 291 "http://kant1.chch.ox.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/TWikiMetaData?raw=debug" "Mozilla/4.0 (co
mpatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98)"
6
(I've replaced "%" with "*" throughout.)

What I don't know is whether there is some way to get things to go into a loop, or whether this person was "trying something on". I haven't tried to reproduce this yet. Has anyone seen this before?

• TWiki version: TWiki20010901
• Web server: Apache 1.3.22 mod_perl/1.26
• Server OS: FreeBSD Stable
• Web browser: IE 5.0
• Client OS: Windows 98

Best wishes, Bob

-- RobertFrazier - 24 Jan 2002 .

Answer

Well....

Yes, I have seen such a thing, but it generally came from a misconfiguration of the Apache web server, creating access loops of some sort, but in your case it might be generated by the Twiki itself.

You seem to have ignored the instalation instructions (TWikiInstallationGuide), in the part that tells you to configure your twiki instalation by editing the TWiki.cfg file, all those %SOMETHING% should not be there.

-- EdgarBrown - 28 Jan 2002

I take it that the following is the relevant section of the configuration file. The TWiki site has been running since Oct. without any problems. The server has been running okay since 95.

$wikiHomeUrl      = "http://kant1.chch.ox.ac.uk/twiki/";
$defaultUrlHost   = "http://kant1.chch.ox.ac.uk";
$scriptUrlPath    = "/twiki/bin";
$pubUrlPath       = "/twiki/pub";
$pubDir           = "/usr/local/www/twiki/pub";
$templateDir      = "/usr/local/www/twiki/templates";
$dataDir          = "/usr/local/www/twiki/data";

-- RobertFrazier - 30 Jan 2002