You gotta hide your stash

A lesson in plugging your access holes before all your bandwidth drains away: The other night, Richard was wondering why the main J-Colo box was all but maxing out its 1Mbit pipe. Dan decided to investigate the web stats, starting with mine. (I wonder why?) Anyway, a couple of clicks later, he saw…

The hurried before-you-kill-me explanation speech went something like this: matthau.yoz.com has, secretly buried within it, my MP3 stash. This MP3 stash is not a public thing; it’s just where I dump files that I want my friends to hear. If there’s a tune I think is particularly apt for some purpose, I put it there and then point my chums at it. And, for some reason lost in the swirling mists of my failing memory, it long ago lost its .htaccess file that asks visitors for a password. I guess I could put it back ow ow ow ow ow OW!

Looking at the above graph one can deduce that Google found it sometime in November, swiftly followed by everyone else on the Internet; it helped that when you Googled for the name of a certain relatively popular album plus “mp3″, my stash came in at #3. It was even linked from several mp3 download sites. This resulted in 136 gig of transfer last month that I completely failed to notice until Richard pointed it out and Dan started hitting me.

It’s a good thing we pay a fixed rate for our bandwidth.

So, here’s the 24-hour MRTG graph of what happened when I put the .htaccess file back (see the last couple of hours):

(I was thinking of doing a process that tailed the access logs and triggered a “screeeeech-CRASH” noise for each 401.)

Weirdest aspect: The first email I ever got from a non-acquaintance visitor to my stash (congratulating me on my excellent musical taste, of course) was seemingly written while I was closing the hole. (Followed, of course, by a couple of emails demanding I open it up again)

The stash is still there, but only for friends (for reasons that should now be blindingly, pipe-cloggingly obvious) and only on request. I do love the stash, though; in time it’s built up to be a kind of instantly-distributable favourite mix tape. More than that, the dates next to each file in the Apache directory listing provide instant nostalgia for the occasions that prompted the upload: Anno’s party in Brighton where I first heard the 15-minute version of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”. Bouncing around the TDV offices with Shim, playing air-cello to Apocalyptica’s “One”. Whirling around the house in Oregon with
Tina, Quinn, Gayle and Lev
to Orbital’s “Way Out”. Dropping the Plumps’ remix of “Stakker Humanoid” at Stef’s party.
Rudolf lending me The Golden Palominos’ “Victim” and it scaring the shit out of me.

In celebration, then: Bow Wow Wow’s ode to home taping, C30 C60 C90 Go!