After the 2.0 version of NoScript installed on my desktop, I began noticing a curious event repeatedly occurring in my Drupal access logs. Every few minutes I would get a hit on the main page of this site from my IP, despite the fact that I wasn’t visiting the site in my browser. Of course, my first concern was that some sort of malware had gotten onto one of our systems, but I discovered that when Firefox was shut off (I had happened to open up the logs in Epiphany because Firefox was slow) the hits stopped - only to start again once Firefox was launched once more.

Once I had gone through the process of disabling all the addons installed, then turning on each one individually I was able to isolate NoScript as the problem. Further testing with other permutations of addons enabled confirmed my theory.

So, I navigated into the Inform Action forums (Inform Action owns NoScript) and found that within the NoScript Support area one of the newest posts was entitled “unknown network traffic”, which struck me as a likely candidate for my problem, as indeed it was.

As it turned out, hosting a web server from the same IP that you access the Internet from conflicts with a feature of NoScript’s ABE. The problem has to do with a feature implemented to prevent computers on the WAN from being taken over - by checking to see if they are externally accessible. Fortunately, the fix is easy - simply go to the NoScript options, the Advanced tab, within the Advanced tab the ABE tab, then deselect the WAN IP check box.