"Bad Bot" Reports
Hi all,
Just a quick note to let folks know about an event with the Treeleaf server that started overnight. If you tried to access Treeleaf via a web browser or Tapatalk and received any sort of "timeout" errors, the issue should be fixed now.
Over an 8 hour period we had an ill behaved bot accessing the forum archives from 1600+ IP addresses, making thousands of HTTP requests per hour. This activity caused the server to run low on memory and CPU resources from time to time. The IP addresses were all at two very large ISPs (e.g. household names for most of us) so I was hesitant to block them (in case any actual member traffic might be blocked).
After spending time reviewing the logs I found no evidence of human / non-bot activity coming from the networks in question, so after discussion among the Treeleaf Engineers, we decided to just block the entire subnets that were hosting the bot.
I'm posting here for four primary reasons:
1. To let folks know if they had trouble accessing the forum or PMs today that there was a reason and it has been addressed as best we can at this time.
2. The bot does not appear to be "malicious" (in the sense of trying to gain unauthorized access). But we've encountered this specific bot in the past and it always behaves really poorly (it sometimes goes beyond our "crawl-delay" limit by orders of magnitude, requests the same resource over and over again, etc.).
3. To let everyone know that if you hear from members via external "channels" (Facebook, email, etc.) that they just cannot access the Treeleaf forum at all, there is a slim possibility (very unlikely IMHO but also not zero) that these recent IP bans are the reason. Kotei and I all have a full list of the subnets banned. So if someone has an issue we can check their IP against the new bans!
4. To say "thank you" to Kotei for noting the start of this issue and helping throughout!
Gassho,
Sekishi
#sat #lah #bots!
Just a quick note to let folks know about an event with the Treeleaf server that started overnight. If you tried to access Treeleaf via a web browser or Tapatalk and received any sort of "timeout" errors, the issue should be fixed now.
Over an 8 hour period we had an ill behaved bot accessing the forum archives from 1600+ IP addresses, making thousands of HTTP requests per hour. This activity caused the server to run low on memory and CPU resources from time to time. The IP addresses were all at two very large ISPs (e.g. household names for most of us) so I was hesitant to block them (in case any actual member traffic might be blocked).
After spending time reviewing the logs I found no evidence of human / non-bot activity coming from the networks in question, so after discussion among the Treeleaf Engineers, we decided to just block the entire subnets that were hosting the bot.
I'm posting here for four primary reasons:
1. To let folks know if they had trouble accessing the forum or PMs today that there was a reason and it has been addressed as best we can at this time.
2. The bot does not appear to be "malicious" (in the sense of trying to gain unauthorized access). But we've encountered this specific bot in the past and it always behaves really poorly (it sometimes goes beyond our "crawl-delay" limit by orders of magnitude, requests the same resource over and over again, etc.).
3. To let everyone know that if you hear from members via external "channels" (Facebook, email, etc.) that they just cannot access the Treeleaf forum at all, there is a slim possibility (very unlikely IMHO but also not zero) that these recent IP bans are the reason. Kotei and I all have a full list of the subnets banned. So if someone has an issue we can check their IP against the new bans!
4. To say "thank you" to Kotei for noting the start of this issue and helping throughout!
Gassho,
Sekishi
#sat #lah #bots!
thank you to our Tech-Jedi
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