Continuously Deployed Dan Mayer's Dev Blog

Well I have on many of my sites had to deal with and fight the onslaught of spam bots, but I still find them amusing some times. After a bug occurred on a production machine, I was looking at the logs and ran into many errors looking like this:

2007-01-11 18:15:05,938 [TP-Processor4395] ERROR com.realestate.search.core.SearchController - java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "http://val
trex-gs.****.com"
2007-01-11 18:15:05,980 [TP-Processor4395] ERROR org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/].[jsp] - Servlet.service() for servlet jsp
threw exception
java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "http://valtrex-gs.***.com"
at java.lang.NumberFormatException.forInputString(NumberFormatException.java:48)

It seems this was a pretty dumb, but probably mildly successful bot. It started some search and found tons of web pages, every time it encountered a form, it would attempt to fill out the majority of the fields with the URL hoping to make it into generated pages, most common search terms, comments, user names, or anything that would possibly link to the URL and increase the sites page rank. I found it hilarious, because somewhere on our site it was trying to fill out number, date, and other fields with the URL which we threw errors on format exceptions and probably returned them to the form with an error about that field. The bot hasn't given up, but hasn't slammed us very hard. Either way it is another amusing tale, of spam bots running amok on the web.

At least they can make me laugh sometimes...

This is a pretty cool project you can use via the update manager you just tell it the type of development you want to do (java swing/j2ee/java webapps/c++/ and others).

Anyways it is pretty good and gets a bunch of plugins together and manages them for you, so if newer versions of one thing still require an older version of another plug in it deals with any incompatibility issues.

You select what you want and then it will say you need other dependencies click the button that says get required.

That seems to be it.

Callisto

peace,
Dan