I was looking at my servers logs in /var/log/nginx and noticed that it is creating log files for a large number of domains that I have nothing to do with. Does anyone know of any configuration setting that I might try looking for that I could have possibly misconfigured to allow something such as this? For an example of the logs it is creating, there is the log file "www.yahoo.com.access.log.1" which shows only the following:

91.117.198.229 - - [26/Jul/2011:22:05:00 -0500] "GET http://www.yahoo.com/ HTTP/1.1" 302 5 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows 95)"

All of the other logs are similar, but for many various other domains. They are all access logs. None of these domains are listed as being served by my server, nor do I see any configuration that would facilitate the serving of those requests.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

Looks like I found what was causing the issue, but still a little unsure about why it was. While getting some help setting up a multi-wordpress site, I set the error/access logs to "/var/log/nginx/$host.access.log". Changing out that $host for a hard coded name seems to have stopped all the new logs from being created.

Now that I know what was causing it, does anyone have any insight in to why it would be accepting requests or creating the logs for external source IPs requesting external domains that have nothing to do with my server? How does that happen?

Thanks.