A long time web-friend of mine, Joe, wrote to me with "two questions". They are:
- What kind of "lappy" did I get?
- How do I block the RIAA from this website?
The first one is rather straightforward. I got the best kind of laptop anyone could buy on my budget. I got a good used one. My real world and cyberfreind exios gave me a great deal on a Compaq Presario 1500. It is a P4 2.2 GHz CPU with 512 MB of RAM, a 40 gig HD and a Cisco Wireless card. I know there are better machines out there but for this "old school" dude this is a great machine. It is, actually, the fastest one I own at present.
The second question is one, which shall be the subject of this blog. Although I would love to take the credit for how I do this, I cannot. It is not that difficult. It is as simple as a cut and paste
I ban the IRAA by the editing of the .htaccess file on my server. If you have access to it on your server you can do it as well. This file is a very powerful server file. Although simple to modify, it should not be messed with lightly for it can easily bring your server to a screeching halt. DEFFINITLY make a backup of the original file before you make any changes.
.htaccess is an ASCII file and, ironically, .htaccess is the file extension. This means that you need to be careful as to how you try and edit it. Most editors will try and put an extension on it such as .txt or .htm . Make sure that it only says .htaccess .
The .htaccess file will allow you to do the following:
- Customize the look of the error documents for your site. There are a lot of them you can change but relevant to this question are:
- 404 - The famous "page not found" error. There are a lot of creative 404 pages out there, in fact, enough to fill a museum
- 403 - What you get when you try and do something you are not allowed to do. The file mentioned below will modify this page with a special message for the RIAA. I modified it somewhat more than that.
- Modify the password protection
- Enable/disable SSI
- Most relevant here, deny access by IP
- Change the default directory page
- Create Redirects
- Prevent the viewing of .htaccess
- Add MIME types
- Prevent hot linking of the images on your site
- Prevent directory listing of your folders
As I said, what we are most interested in is IP banning. I got this file and pasted it into my .htaccess file. Then I simply overwrote the existing file on my server.
That is about all we need to do to ban the RIAA. If you wish to learn more about what you can do with .htacess I would suggest this tutorial.
