So, You Think You Know my Uptimes?

(And... Will Netcraft Crawl my Site?)

Rather unfortunately, a power blackout ruined any chance of pushing 200 days or more uptime. Saved Virtual Machine states were unable to assist in the rectification of this issue. 

Given the site will be hosted on other another mooo.com subdomain (not mine) for the forseeable future, this page has now reached "Archival State."

The wide, amazing world of the Internet has spawned a great deal of curiosities that serve to inform the masses, or "detective-type" minorities. Recently, I became aware of a site known as "Netcraft," whose purpose is seemingly webserver surveying, among other things.

Their site came to my attention one day when Googling "Windows NT4 Webservers," I got an answer to that query:
(At least) 50,000 of these still exist , running IIS-4, as of April 2014 when their surveying data was released. About three quarters of those appear to resolve to a computer in Norway.

There were several popular sites running Windows NT4, complemented with IIS4, at least until April 2014. They included Australia's own Australia Post (who used it for the online shop and internal billing operations), Air India's booking website, and a French Government Department Homepage of some sort.
It would seem as of late-2014, Netcraft is reporting the use of Apache/nginix webserver systems at Australia Post.
As of late-2015, the Webmaster has discovered several "redirection" domains in use at Australia Post that still report the use of NT4/IIS4, here, here AND here

Netcraft had in fact been documenting my own Website, since at least from the middle of 2014 or so*. Unfortunately, when I first checked it, the data was woefully out of date, with about a month having passed since the last time Netcraft had crawled my site. I decided to use this page to demonstrate that my uptimes on Windows 2000 Professional were BETTER than their statistics were suggesting.
Since November 2014, Netcraft's reporting of this Server's uptime have begun to improve dramatically. It actually seems visiting the page to check the site's report results in some kind of "request" being added to a schedule - and the Netcraft Bot will then fetch a HTTP header sometime in the next 72hrs.

Netcraft also seems to think this site is hosted from a machine running Windows Server 2003. As a matter of fact, the Host Operating System (This site runs from a Virtaul Machine) is W2K-3, but the virtual machine hosting this site at its original domain HTTP address (http://limestoneformation.mooo.com) was Windows 2000.Netcraft themselves claim that Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 share a similarl TCP/IP stack that precludes monitoring the OS version reliably.
If using IIS***, it is possible to accurately denote the OS the Webserver runs due to differences between IIS versions usedon different versions of Windows. See Below, as this actually as a result of a misconfiguration with Apache webserver.

This site is served from a Windows 2000 machine2**.

The original purpose of this page was to see if I could "out-monitor" a monitoring-bot service such as Netcraft. By early-January 2016, when the power failure ocurred, it became much more than that. I wanted this to be an endurance test of Windows. That it was. When I rebooted Windows, the user profile used to login had corrupted, although this was easily remedied by removal the "USERNAME.bak" file from the Document & Settings folder within the boot drive.

Some day, I hope to resume monitoring uptimes - although as the site will be held in stasis on another site, this plan will be placed on the back burner for the time being.

Netcraft's Uptime Data... 9th January, 2016

And here's what my Webserver had to say at the same time:

Windows 2000 SP4, 8th January, 2016

You may also wish to view my historical Uptimes Data. All image are compressed to around 50-75kb in size. The time it takes for them to download may vary depending on my upload speeds at any given time. Unfortunately, I have no control over this.

Oops!

Some time ago, the Webserver (Host OS, Server 2003) experienced a BSOD. The system hung for several hours without my knowledge. I simply thought the router (a lowly Thomson "thing") was dropping connections again. I rebooted the system and restarted the Virtual Machine.

It turns out the system ran for 2 days with Microsoft's Default IIS5 homepage open.

How Did this Happen?
Well, it seems that Apache never started up with Windows. I run IIS just locally as an FTP server to more easily edit this site. IIS would *never* startup because Apache would be holding Port 80, and you can't run two services on the same port, it seems.

What happened in this case was a bit of diddling in http.conf had caused Apache to throw errors on startup (Remember I added Error Pages? Well, I changed "FollowSymLinks" and apparently didn't test this before what happened, happened). So IIS saw an opportunity to run the HTTP operation, and took it. It therefore served its default page for some time (about 2 days). Here's proof. And finally, there is NO DOUBT what OS I'm running :)

The IIS default website being served... OOPS
This was the first sign of a very major security hole... Thankfully it seems nothing bad happened during the time IIS was running over Port 80!

Netcraft. For once, they were correct
And FOR ONCE... Netcraft's data was accurate to-the-day, and reflected the trouble that was brewing within the Webserver. You can checkout this record here...
Site Navigation:
Home -> Features Index -> YOU ARE HERE {Uptimes}

1. *Uptimes monitoring requires hardware capable of connecting to the internet, an internet connection that doesn't quite suck, a registered domain, web-server software, Port 80, 443 etc to be OPEN and a supported operating system such as Windows 2000.

2. **Therefore, this system (albeit virtual) is one of about 500,000 Windows 2000 systems that still operate open-faced to the internet, serving up webpages, mail and other things.

3. ***Running IIS even in the latest releases of Microsoft's operating system's is really asking for trouble. If you choose to be a nelly, and run IIS - Please take appropriate measures to secure your webserver such that it cannot be comprised and risk the loss of sensitive data from other machines on your network. Since I only have legit copies of defunct OS', running IIS would probably result in 10ft-flames venting from my poor Server platform. If you choose to run IIS on unsupported platforms, fine, but seriously, YOU ARE AKSING FOR IT! This is the reason why I am running Apache 2.2.x on this Webserver

Page Created: 8/11/14
Last Modified: 17/01/16: Images
18/10/15 Updated images, Added New "Netcraft History" images
    21/07: Substantial editing of page structure, Grammar and "flow"