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For the past day and a half I've been setting up my Raspberry Pi for hosting a small website. I'm using Apache2, PHP & MySQl and have installed AWStats so I can keep track of some things.

Everything is near ready to go public, however I've notcied some strange statistics in AWStats.

Under the "Hosts (Top 10)" area, I see the first result;

Host             Pages Hits Bandwidth
Matthew-PC       125   237  642.61 KB

which is my own computer- this looks about right as I've been setting up stuff in WordPress and testing other things out like phpMyAdmin.

However, below that I see;

Host                Pages Hits Bandwidth  
namehere-vaio.home  9     9    90.39 KB

this is strange (to me), because whilst that computer has been on all day, it has not once visited the site as far as I'm aware because 1) I've checked the history, 2) the computer's user does not have access to the router's settings (so wouldn't see hostnames, nor would they see port forwarding rules), and wouldn't even know that using "raspberrypi" in their browser would take them to the site and 3) the "Last Visit" time has once been a time at which I know nobody was using the computer (but it was still on).

There are also a couple of other devices from my home network listed, too.

Is this normal, and is there any explanation for it (bug, possible security issue etcetera)? My R-Pi is connected using ethernet.

edit 1: found this in the access.log file;

192.168.1.** - - [01/Jan/2013:21:59:07 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 10284 "-" "-"

which is namehere-vaio.home. What does - - mean?

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Could it be that the pi is using an IP address that something else used to, and the vaio is trying to get to something else? –  Paul Jan 1 '13 at 23:00
I'm not sure, the Vaio's internal address is, and the Pi's internal address is My router uses DHCP to assign IP addresses to devices for 24 hours at a time. The Vaio has had it's assigned IP address for about an hour, and the Pi for near 6 hours. I updated AWStats and noticed that the Vaio's pages hits and bandwidth have gone up to 311, 311 3.04 MB, respectively. I grep'd the access log with the Vaio's IP address and all requests look identical to the one I've provided above, and there are roughly two per-minute. –  Nysepho Jan 1 '13 at 23:14
I've noticed that one of the top hosts is now host**-***-***-***.range86-148.btcentralplus.com, the asterisks being my external IP address. I'm wondering if this is because my site's main URL is _______.tld which is a CNAME record to a no-IP address (which automatically updates through a setting on router automatically). –  Nysepho Jan 2 '13 at 0:17
I am not sure how to progress this - the logs will be accurate (from the perspective of the web server, as it does reverse lookups to work out the hostnames of incoming connections), but the why of it is a bit dependent on the vaio, and what is running on it. Either way, I don't see a security risk or bug here. –  Paul Jan 2 '13 at 8:50
Yeah, I'm beginning to think it's not a security risk with the actual web server. I reset my router (to reassign IP addresses to each device) and I no longer see the Vaio, however I still see btcentralplus.com but I'm not worried about that. Thanks! –  Nysepho Jan 2 '13 at 12:26

1 Answer 1

up vote 0 down vote accepted

I thought about Paul's suggestion and so reset my router so that each device would be assigned a new IP address, and the Vaio no longer shows up in AWStats or the access log, so it is indeed possible that the Vaio was trying to access something that had previously had the same IP address as my RPi. It must have been something running on the Vaio and not the RPi itself, question solved!

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