Five years ago, almost to the day, I posted a message on the Notes forum declaring that this site was under DoS attack. As is typical of me I jumped to conclusions and went shooting my mouth off without working out what was going on. Although, in my defence, this really did look like an attack.

However, after investigating further I found out what was going on and reported back to the forum with an update. The guilty party was a product call Offline Explorer, which some fool body had selfishly pointed at the site and left running for hours on end. Since that day I had become a sworn enemy of such web-scraping products. Do these people not appreciate the cost of bandwidth?!

What I never thought I'd end up doing five years later is downloading the very same product and pointing it at my own website, which is what I did this weekend.

I'm in the process of moving a few websites hosted with Easily.co.uk to my own dedicated web box. I've fancied having my own server for a while now and Easily's service is really started to stink. Everything was going well until I tried to move my gallery site.

The gallery site uses a PHP script to upload the photos to the server. It's only now that I realised the file permissions of these uploaded files only allowed the "apache" user to read them. This is fine for operation of the website, but no good at all when I try to download them back to my PC via FTP, as my user account has no access to the files.

Trying a PHP script to run a chmod command on all files failed and I was about to resort to the desperate measure of calling tech support at Easily. Then I remembered Offline Explorer. Using this I could easily point it at the gallery site and it would simply download all the photos. It took no time at all, placed all the photos nicely in one folder and was probably quicker than FTP would have been anyway. Offline Explorer is now forgiven.

All I have to do now is wait for (not so) Easily.co.uk to add my new box's IP addresses as global entries to the list of name servers and the move is complete. Any day now...