I got a Ubuntu 12.04 apache2 server running. Suddenly there where hostnames instead of IP-addresses
in the logfiles. The directive Hostnamelookups was set to 'off' in all config files i could find. The server had previously logged using IP-addresses, what's up?
Problem found:
I add blocking of usually Chines client trying to hack the server by block the ISP range they comes from.
Normally I add
deny from 123.123.123.0/24
to block out a certain range of IP's, but its not so fun to calculate ranges so I had added
deny from 123.123.123.0 - 123.123.123.255
instead.
Apache didn't complain so I though it was smart enough to interpret that as a range but it wasn't. Instead it tries to look it up as a hostname.
So now you know if you Apache server starts to log hostnames instead of IP-addresses, you screwed up.
