Carl’s SEO & Web Design Blog

Here are a few good web sites for developers:

Lost your site?
You try to pull up your site on the Internet and it won’t come up. Is it your computer, the network, or your server? A quick way to find out is to go to http://www.alertra.com. For free, they will attempt to reach your site from various cities around the world and tell you how much time it takes to reach your site from each location. They also offer a subscription service if you want them to continuously monitor your up time.

Are You On a Spammer Black List?
Your mail may be filtered by various servers if you are on one of these black lists. This site will check your IP on those lists and verify your IP is good. Go to http://rbls.org.

Who sent that Spam?
So you got illegal spam. Do you know how to trace it to the source host? Use your email program to read the header. Although much of the header can be forged, those lines beginning “Received: from…” are very difficult for a sender to forge. Check your email program to find out how to read the header, then look for those “Received: from…” lines going top down - remember, the header is tracing backwards through the various relay points. The last one is generally the one with the IP of the sender’s host. Here is an example of the last “Received: from…” line from an illegal spam today:

Received: from source ([59.23.108.165]) by exprod7mx54.postini.com ([64.18.6.10]) with SMTP;
Tue, 06 Jun 2006 09:04:12 EDT

This spam is from a host at 59.23.108.

Take that IP and go to http://www.samspade.org or http://www.netsol.com or http://www.tucows.com to find the spammer’s host.

Any email listing on this registrar is often non-functional or, in some cases, an abuse email listing that generates only an auto-reply. The best way to stop the spammer is to put the IP on your own black list (as we do) and make it available to hackers for their fun. You have to take charge of your own spam problem.

How is Your Internet Speed?
What’s your true Internet speed? You can use the web site at http://bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/ to test your site and get your speed.

How’s Your Firewall?
This site will test your firewall, check to see you have no reverse DNS (generally, you do not want reverse DNS), and tell you your current IP. All free. This is Steve Gibson’s famous Shields Up site”
>https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2.

How’s Your Anti-Virus?
GFI will test your anti-virus protection free at:
http://www.gfi.com/emailsecuritytest/, but don’t expect to past this. They sell the really good enterprise-level stuff, so your home system may not pass this one.

Note: the anti-virus and firewall testing tools will NOT damage your system, but if you are on a network you should check with the network administrator first. He may get worried if he or she sees someone trying to get through the network defense system.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at 10:43 am and is filed under Web Design, Security, Spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.