A strange thing happened to me while I was working on the DTP site. Over the course of approximately 11 minutes, the number of visitors on that site jumped from about 4 to 50 and then back down to 2. I did notice that hits on the Cast page, our most popular page, had gone from a total of 514 to 552 since the last time that I had checked about 4 hours earlier. So maybe they were real visitors, and not some kind of computer glitch somewhere in the world.
Hard to say. It could be a random blip, or someone could have been probing the site for vulnerabilities.
If it were a probe, it may not be a malicious one. Some people check for sites' weak points out of curiosity, and a few even write to tell the sites' owners what they found.
However, if you want to be careful, you might want to mention what happened to whoever manages the site, and maybe talk about security - not just the site's, but also that on your own machines.
This precaution is probably especially important in your case, since, if I remember correctly, you routinely run as root. Should the site ever happen to be compromised, and you go to upload files to the site, then there's a direct conduit for damaging your machines.
You might especially want to ask about (or do an Internet search) on the concept of defence in depth. The term's more or less self-explanatory, but its application is worth understanding.
-- Bruce Byfield http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield
