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I have 3 screens on my main machine, which is in another room and is powered on 24/7. So to cut down on glare, when I retire for the night, I blanks the screens with CTRL-ALT-F1. I can bring them back with CTRL-ALT-F7 in the morning, but from time to time there is a wierd image that floats for a time above the X displays and then disappears. It contains text which appears to be HTML with error information about a DNS lookup.

It is also hard to understand because the text is truncated at the right margin rather than wrapping, so only a fragment is actually visible. The image is static -- I cannot scroll it.

I would like to know:

  1. What is the origin of this image. I know it has a Linux Journal logo, but that just makes it more mysterious.
  2. What does it signify.
  3. Why does it only show up while the screens are returning from local console mode; it's not at all clear to me what this has to do with DNS.

The image: Weird ERROR image

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  • That is the page for Cloudflare error 1016. Essentially something is trying to access a Linux Journal URL that doesn't exist like secure2.linuxjournal.com/test for example. Do you have some program that routinely checks Linux Journal for updates, maybe some feed?
    – MC10
    Commented Nov 7, 2022 at 20:21
  • @MC10 I have nothing like that that I'm aware of. However, this image has been in use since 2002, and may have some stuff I've forgotten. I am the only one who's does anything on it, and I don't even know what a "feed" would be in this context. Is there some what to track such a thing down?
    – 4dummies
    Commented Nov 7, 2022 at 20:28
  • I was thinking something along the lines of an RSS feed, but if you don't use any program to read Linux Journal regularly then that's probably not it. It looks like when Linux Journal changed ownership, people were archiving old issues. Maybe some program makes a reference to an article with a now defunct link. I'm not too familiar with Linux but someone else might have an idea on how to track down where the request is coming from.
    – MC10
    Commented Nov 7, 2022 at 20:47
  • Strange: The HTML uses Internet Explorer conditional comments, while you're on Linux.
    – harrymc
    Commented Nov 7, 2022 at 20:50

1 Answer 1

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Hmm. MC10 may have put me onto the answer. I used find and fgrep to scan my web page(s) and found .mobi files (books for my Fire tablet) that reference relevant sites: four that reference cloudflare and one that references linuxjournal.com (albeit without the secure2 hostname).

My guess is that a web spider stumbles into them occasionally and tries to follow the link(s). It would explain the occasional persistent recurrence.

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