At my company, our website is hosted with GoDaddy's shared hosting service. I was tidying up the html folder today and noticed a file called hitnodes.php which I hadn't noticed before. It was only 16 lines long, and the code seemed innocuous, and just printed out the hostname of the server we're on and a bunch of dots.
I was pretty sure we didn't put it there, which lead me to believe it was from GoDaddy, so I called their support to see if they knew what it was. The guy I talked to just said "oh, I'll delete that", and when I asked what it was, he said that he wasn't allowed to tell me (!), and that he had just deleted it. When I pressed him as to why there was a file in our site that he couldn't tell us about, he just said it had to do with server maintenance and he couldn't tell me anything else about it.
So half out of concern that this could be part of some exploit that he didn't want to spook me about, and half out of pure curiosity, I've been trying to find out what this script is for, but the most I could turn up was this page talking about a method to quickly check for errors on a 4GH or Grid system. I didn't really follow what the author of that blog was talking about, and I was hoping that someone here might have a good explanation for the purpose of this script and how it works, and maybe some idea of why the GoDaddy representative was being so cagey about it. If it was just to check if a node was having problems, why not say "Oh, that was so we could quickly see if the server was having problems."? Not exactly state secrets...
Here's the code reproduced for your scrutiny:
<?php
if ( $_SERVER["OS"] == "Windows_NT" ) {
$hostname = strtolower($_SERVER["COMPUTERNAME"]);
} else {
$hostname = `hostname`;
$hostnamearray = explode('.', $hostname);
$hostname = $hostnamearray[0];
}
if ( !preg_match("/[0-9]{2,4}/", $hostname, $match) ) die("Failed to detect node");
$node = $match[0];
if ( preg_match("/^0/", $node) ) $node += 1000;
header("Content-Length: " . $node);
$response = $hostname . "<br />Padding: ";
$response = $response . str_repeat('.', $node - strlen($response));
echo $response;
?>
