Ok, I received my first hit from the dreaded tide.microsoft.com!
There has been much conspiracy over who or what tide.microsoft.com is.
It turns out that tide.microsoft.com is part of the microsoft campus proxy.
Anybody on the microsoft campus browsing the web, does so via this proxy.
Wonder what microsoft people are doing looking at a site that talks a lot about linux?
The format of the hit is as below: (I have masked the ip)
131.107.*.*
[tide535.microsoft.com]
United States
Internet Explorer
Agent String: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50215; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
It turns out that I am not the only person to have experienced this, many other Blog and non-Blog users have had the same or a similar hit, such as on this Ham Radio Blog
Quite bizarre really, heres a link to a blog article all about the tide conspiracy!
What was weird about my case though was the sheer volume of hits, over 21,000 in 30 minutes. I’m not pushing any sort of conspiracy theory, but that is a good deal of traffic all at once if it was in fact people in Redmond visiting my site.
Hi Tim
I agree that 21,000 hits is hardly explained by your average human using a web browser. To be honest, the most hits google have given me is a couple of hundred spread out through a day.
I can’t really make sense of it, it must be some automated process.
Besides, just because tide.microsoft.com is on the microsoft campus does not mean that it can’t be some form of crawler. People tend to forget that.
Jono
I got one too tide535.microsoft.com