Hooray, I finally got my Star San sanitizer from my homebrew supplier! Well, this is the second attempt to get the Star San. My supplier delivered wrongly to me for the first time (he gave me Iodophor) and he later said that he will send the Star San to me by snail mail. I guess I am not that lucky, I got another bottle of Iodophor instead. And just the beginning of this week the supplier finally sent the correct bottle to me, as you can see from the photo above. Hahaha, nothing will stand between me and my Star San!

The reason why I am very keen to use Star San instead of Iodophor is because I am very afraid of staining. Iodophor is actually iodine, so when in contact with plastics, it may stain it and that’s going to be very difficult to remove. I don’t want my plastic fermenter, stirring spoon and bottles to have stains on them. And although I don’t smell any iodine smell in the Iodophor and it is supposed to be a no-rinse sanitizer, I still find it rather uncomfortable when using it to sanitize my equipment. So I will normally rinse the equipment first. For Star San, I would say I feel much better to use it as my sanitizer of choice.

And that little bottle is going to last for some time. All you need is about 1/4 cupful of Star San and mix with 500ml of clean water to do your sanitizing. Best of all, you can re-use the sanitize if it doesn’t become dirty. Normally, what brewers would do is to use a spray bottle and spray the solution on the surface of their brewing equipment. For bottles, they would use a “water blaster“. It is sort of like a fountain where you insert the bottles to the nose of the blaster and squeeze the sanitizing solution into beer bottles. This way, you will be able to cover all the interior surface of the bottles. And it works much faster than using a spray bottle and trying to get the solution into the beer bottle.

Well, I have already brewed one batch last week, so this came a little too late. But hey, there will be always more brews to do.

Well guys, I have bad news. One of my directories got attacked by someone or something. Not too sure how it works but they did leeched about 28GB of bandwidth this month. I have checked my weblog and discovered that it all goes to 404 pages, which are the error pages. So apparently someone or something is hitting on a page which doesn’t exist at all on my directory and they are doing it pretty frequently. The bandwidth transfer goes to 1Mbps from 10am to 12am Singapore time and for my website, that’s just amazing. I have ruled out normal visitor usage as nobody would hit the 404 page so often (that is using 1GB of bandwidth per day!) and exactly around the same time everyday.

I didn’t discover this problem till my webhost complained that I have been using too much bandwidth. So I checked my weblog and told them the problem. Luckily they did check and later told me that it could very likely be a DOS attack on my site. And I have to agree. My human visitors didn’t increase so much till the bandwidth jumps 28GB for this month as well as the previous month. Those are the 2 months that hit such a high peak. The rest of the time, I barely clock up 10GB per month in total. Plus the search engine bots used up about only 500MB in bandwidth total. So, that scenario of search engine bots hammering my site is not very likely. One of the forumers suggested that it could be due to the fact that my site is too slow (like server overload) and that users kept on “refreshing” my site and thus there are tons of wasted bandwidth. Again, I doubt that to be the case. From my end, the site loads fine during the peak periods. I have tested it myself. It doesn’t seem to be the server load issue. More of a bandwidth issue. Plus, the majority of the bandwidth still goes to the 404 error pages. In my opinion, I think this is also another very unlikely scenario.

I think the most likely reason and as stated by my webhost is DOS attack. However, I am at a lost at what I should do. Other than asking my webhost to deny the attackers IP addresses, there don’t seem to be anything I can do. Is there anything I can do to help prevent such attacks in the future? Or is my webhost not having the proper firewall at their site in the first place? I have been using their service for over 2 years now and I am sure that I didn’t face such problems in the past.