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"Forbidden" in error log

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    "Forbidden" in error log

    I recently moved my web application to a new host, onto a dedicated web server. I have been having trouble lately with the web site suddenly becoming sluggish, even unresponsive. When I log on to the server with Remoted Desktop, I see that the WAS is using practically all of the CPU's resources. Then I notice that the error log is growing exponentially. When I open the log, this error is being recorded about 300 times per second:

    [Wed Jun 18 05:59:58 2008] [Forbidden] "The requested file cannot be accessed."+chr(13)+chr(10)+"<p>The server was not able to access the requested file."+chr(13)+chr(10)+"This is typically due to your opertaing system's security permissions on this file or the"+chr(13)+chr(10)+"folder it is contained in.</p>"

    If I restart the WAS, everything is fine again, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for hours or days, but the problem keeps coming back.

    Is this a DOS attack? or is it the result of faulty code? Any ideas?

    Nathan

    #2
    Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

    The error log will just give you the message you show below, but the Access or Raw logs will show the originating IP address and target filename. Look at both to determine where these hit are coming from. They may in fact be internal to your LAN.
    Steve Wood
    See my profile on IADN

    Comment


      #3
      Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

      There are no corresponding requests in the access log, at least nothing that corresponds to the same time stamp as the entries in the error log.

      However, I did find an entry in the raw log that corresponded to the same time stamp as the first entry in a list of "Forbidden" entries:

      06/13/2008 05:59:30 57 am 05:59:30
      66.249.73.17
      GET /theremnant/2003/May/theremnant-may2003-otherarticles.a5w HTTP/1.1
      Host: 216.119.103.190
      Connection: Keep-alive
      Accept: */*
      From: googlebot(at)googlebot.com
      User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
      Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

      This looks to me like a request from Google's bot, which seems to me should be harmless enough. Am I missing something here?

      Nathan

      Comment


        #4
        Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

        These tend to stop of you add .txt files to the always allowed files in the page security settings - I believe it was mentioned a while back that this is the result of a search bot trying to read the robots.txt file on your server.

        Comment


          #5
          Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

          It's now three weeks later, and this issue keeps re-occuring. I have a robots.txt file and a favicon.ico file, and I've added .txt and .ico to the list of file types that are always allowed in the page security assignment. However, at this point I have not enabled the Security Framework on the server.

          BTW, this application is running on Windows Server 2008 (64 bit).

          Any other ideas?

          Nathan

          P.S. There was one period in the last 3 weeks when I thought that the problem had disappeared on its own. There were no incidents like this for about a week and a half. But now it's happening fairly often (six times in the last five days).
          Last edited by Nathan Zeiset; 07-11-2008, 02:10 PM.

          Comment


            #6
            Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

            This problem is not going away. I'm beginning to suspect that it has something to do with Windows Server 2008's tighter security. I'd really like to get this thing solved, but I don't know what to try next.

            Nathan

            Comment


              #7
              Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

              I guess we should focus on the error message:

              [Wed Jun 18 05:59:58 2008] [Forbidden] "The requested file cannot be accessed."+chr(13)+chr(10)+"<p>The server was not able to access the requested file."+chr(13)+chr(10)+"This is typically due to your opertaing system's security permissions on this file or the"+chr(13)+chr(10)+"folder it is contained in.</p>"
              It refers to a file named ."+chr(13)+chr(10)+"<p>. and a folder named "+chr(13)+chr(10)+".

              What is that? Those are not valid names for either. It's basically a CRLF(). Is that what all of the error message say? And can you isloate where such odd file/folder name are coming from? Look for code that creates a file, maybe a log file or text file, somewhere on the server.
              Steve Wood
              See my profile on IADN

              Comment


                #8
                Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

                All 300 errors per second say exactly the same thing.

                When you say look for code, I'm assuming that you mean code that is generated by the WAS. I can only think of one page on our site that creates a file on the server (it allows users to upload jpegs), and that one seems to be working properly. Besides, there are no corresponding requests in the access log that get logged at the same time as when the errors start. That seems to mean that the errors are not triggered by a page request. Am I thinking correctly?

                Nathan

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

                  Use a text search utility or Alpha's Search all... from the Web Edit menu. Find the string "+chr(13)+chr(10)+" in your project. See where this is found and evaluate for possible errors. Look especially where the code saves or requests a file. I'd look at the published files as well as your development files.
                  Steve Wood
                  See my profile on IADN

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

                    So far I haven't been able to find such a string. In the web projects control panel, I clicked on Edit, then "Search in all Web Project files...". Nothing turned up. I also used Windows Explorer's search feature to search for this phrase in the files that make up the website, both on my development computer and the server. Nothing of significance showed up.

                    I should mention that the search on the server indicated that several Word documents contained the string, although when I open them in Word and search for it, I can't find it. It also indicated that a5_html_calendar.js contained it, but there again, it didn't show up when I used Wordpad to search the file.

                    Nathan

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

                      Nathan,

                      In Word you do a search for ^p (lowercase p) which stands for a paragraph marker. Use that to search and it will highlight the end of every line of text that has a standard "carriage return" and "line feed" which Steve has you looking for with chr(13)+chr(10)

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

                        I can certainly find plenty of instances of ^p in the Word documents, but I don't think that has anything to do with this error, since the documents don't contain any commands, let alone any commands to save or request a file.

                        Nathan

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

                          This remains a puzzling and frustrating problem for me. Last evening it occurred five times. I have the WAS running under AlwaysUp, which is configured to restart the WAS if it hogs the CPU for more than five minutes. About a minute after restarting (sometimes more, sometimes less), the errors would start logging again. After attempting to restart it the 6th time, AlwaysUp choked and failed to restart the WAS, resulting in our site being down all night until I discovered it this morning. (I'm waiting for a response from Core Technologies on that issue.)

                          Perhaps it would help if I would turn off logging, but I really don't want to give up my access log, and it looks like I can't turn off one without the other.

                          Am I the only one experiencing this? I'm close to my wit's end on this one.

                          Nathan

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

                            This problem occurred 11 times in an hour and a half period early this morning. What should I do? As I said earlier, I suspect that it's a security issue with Windows Server 2008. Can anyone verify this? or disprove it? Is anyone running WAS v8 on Windows Server 2008 successfully without this issue?

                            I think I might be able to get our hosting company to install Windows Server 2003 instead, but I'm reluctant to do it unless I can be fairly certain that doing so would take care of this issue. Even then, I'd rather not, since it would mean that our site would be down for quite a long time while the server's system is being rebuilt and our web site is being restored.

                            Any help would be appreciated! I'm sorry, but I don't know where else to find answers.

                            Nathan

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Re: &quot;Forbidden&quot; in error log

                              You need a second pair of eyes to look at your server's desktop. You have to go through a logical test plan. If I were you, I would:

                              Find a buddy and install the application on a second server, see if it causes any problem.

                              Disable access to the web application, but leave the server running. See if the problem still manifests - indicates not application related if so.

                              Add a robots.txt to the document root to stop robots from browsing the website.*

                              Create a new dummy application and publish it to the server, see if this new
                              app also produces the same errors.

                              Install a packet-sniffer, or HTTP Debugger Pro to monitor incoming traffic and correlate to the error messages.

                              View the server's event log for correlation.

                              You've never indicated what else is on this server. Like I would not expect Word files to be on a server.

                              * Just create a file named robots.txt with the following content and place in the document root:

                              # go away
                              User-agent: *
                              Disallow: /
                              Steve Wood
                              See my profile on IADN

                              Comment

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