Filtering the noise at the edge
This entry documents a routine for capturing, reviewing, and flagging IP addresses that probed the Academy's web and mail servers in late 2005. The notes describe how incoming requests were matched against manual block lists before being passed on to application-level filters.
- IP Check
- SB Server
- MT Server
- Anti-Spam
Server setups referenced
Two server environments appear in the original write-up. The SB configuration handled the static portions of the site, while the MT configuration served the blog and comment endpoints. Both fed logs into a shared review queue for IP verification.
Captured traffic was grouped by source subnet, cross-checked against reverse DNS records, and then added to a per-server deny table when the origin looked suspicious.
Why the routine mattered
Spam comments and unsolicited contact form submissions had become a daily occurrence by December 2005. The author walked through how an early version of an IP filter module was wired into the comment pipeline and how false positives were identified and released back into the pool.
This log entry is one of several early Japan PC Academy posts that fed into the later, broader discussion of migrating the publication stack to WordPress in 2008.