DenialOfService

Does anybody have a solution to temporarily ban IPs that are launching

a DOS attack?

AlexSchroeder's Emacs Wiki got disabled on 2002-12-30 and on 2003-02-03 because of "too much CPU usage" and when the ISP was prompted into investigating, they found an IP number that was the cause of all this, and banned it. I would like to have an automatic solution for this, however.

Usemod

You can use the BanEdit? action to create a banlist file in the DataDirectory?, and patch using WikiPatches/BannedCannotRead?. This requires you to know about the DOS attack, however. Thus, this is not really a solution.

What we need is WikiPatches/SurgeProtector based on some discussion on MeatBall:SurgeProtector.

Apache

Get a provider that has one of the following modules installed:

• mod_bandwidth -- http://www.cohprog.com/mod_bandwidth.html
• mod_throttle -- http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_throttle/
• mod_dosevasive -- http://apache.slashdot.org/apache/02/10/30/1236234.shtml?tid=95
• mod_bwshare -- http://www.topology.org/src/bwshare/README.html

Other Wikis

If you're looking for existing code to copy, you might take a look at the [WikkiTikkiTavi] implementation (written in PHP). It uses a MySQL? DB to store the usage data. I haven't tested it, but it looks like a good anti-DOS implementation. --CliffordAdams

Robots.txt

Somebody suggested that the problem is that robots don't obey "robots.txt" -- but that is only correct if you forbid robots from entering the wiki. And that surely is not what you want -- you want your pages indexed by Google and friends.