[WEB4LIB] One AOL user appearing as many?

[Chris Deweese]

I run a webserver from my house using Internet Information Server 5 and also here at the Lewis and Clark Library System we use Internet Information Server 4.  In all weblogs that I read, users from AOL will appear to be coming from up to 8 IP Address.  Large scale ISP's implement huge numbers of proxy servers that cache webpages viewed by all users of that ISP.  But for some reason it appears that AOL users get pieces of webpages from several different proxy servers.  This is rather frustrating and disturbing to someone like me, who on top of being a Webmaster is also an avid "Security buff".  

I watch my servers very closely (my home one for sure) and I have not noticed any truly suspicious activity other than the multiple proxy address from the AOL.com domain.

Hope this helps 

Chris Deweese
Lewis and Clark Library System
www.lcls.lib.il.us
---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: Bob Duncan <duncanr at mail.lafayette.edu>
Reply-To: duncanr at mail.lafayette.edu
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 08:30:59 -0800 (PST)

>
>Our Innovative WebPAC has a limited number of logins.  We rarely run out, 
>but several times yesterday we did, and the culprit appeared to be multiple 
>users from IP addresses which resolved to some variation of the following 
>hostnames:
>         cache-mtc-ag06.proxy.aol.com
>         spider-mtc-tf021.proxy.aol.com
>
>I think it unlikely that ten different AOL users were hitting the server 
>simultaneously.
>
>An Innovative Users Group list member made the following observation:
>>As I understand it from some web log reporting software documentation, each
>>piece of a single web page may be gotten by a different AOL server, seeming
>>to the web server like 6 or 8 different users.
>
>Does this sound familiar to anyone?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Bob Duncan
>
>
>~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`
>   Robert E. Duncan
>   Systems Librarian
>   David Bishop Skillman Library
>   Lafayette College
>   Easton, PA 18042
>   610-330-5156
>   duncanr at lafayette.edu
>   http://www.library.lafayette.edu/
>
>