Skip to content

Add X-Blog-Check to the keep-list this document already describes #84

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
ptr727 merged 3 commits into from
Aug 9, 2026
Merged

Add X-Blog-Check to the keep-list this document already describes #84

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
3 commits
Select commit Hold shift + click to select a range
fa1f518
Add X-Blog-Check to the keep-list this document already describes
ptr727 Aug 9, 2026
9620490
Say the log omits headers rather than that headers are dropped
ptr727 Aug 9, 2026
4c49058
Name the log keys, since that is what a reader greps for
ptr727 Aug 9, 2026
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion OPERATIONS.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -299,7 +299,7 @@ Widen `== 404` to `>= 400` for the whole non-200 sweep the table above describes

### Retention Is the Prerequisite, and It Belongs to the Host

**On the VPS the reviewable record is Traefik's access log**, at `/var/log/traefik/access.log`, one JSON object per line, one line per request, across every hostname the host serves. `RequestPath` carries the query string, so the legacy `/?p=<id>` traffic is visible as itself. Request headers are dropped except `Referer` and `User-Agent`, which is what keeps the Pangolin resource access token out of a file that is retained and copied, and query strings are logged in full, so treat an extract as sensitive.
**On the VPS the reviewable record is Traefik's access log**, at `/var/log/traefik/access.log`, one JSON object per line, one line per request, across every hostname the host serves. `RequestPath` carries the query string, so the legacy `/?p=<id>` traffic is visible as itself. The log records only three request headers, which appear as the keys `request_Referer`, `request_User-Agent`, and `request_X-Blog-Check`, and omits the rest from the record rather than stripping them from the request, which still arrives intact. That omission is what keeps the Pangolin resource access token out of a file that is retained and copied, and query strings are logged in full, so treat an extract as sensitive. That keep-list is the host's to hold and is the precondition the outward pass depends on: a header absent from it does not appear in the log at all, which is indistinguishable from a request that never sent one.

**That log rotates and is eventually deleted, on a schedule the host sets and can change.** The window is long, and it is finite, so anything the inward pass depends on has to be copied off the host before the archive ages out. Read the current retention from the host rather than from this file, because a number written here is a number nothing checks.

Expand Down