Sadly, I’m fighting bots again. The site was mostly unreachable for a day or more. Here’s a Munin graph of server load for a week. Normal load is between 0.5 and 1.0. The server has two virtual cores, so a load of up to 2.0 means happy happy. A load of nearly 40 means sad faces at Casa Emacs Wiki. There’s more on my blog for the curious. – Alex Schroeder

😩

– MaDa

I spent more than an hour trying to figure out why my server had a load of nearly 40. All I discovered is that load went down when I shut down Emacs Wiki. Well, I needed to sleep and I‘ve got plans for the next few days so I shut it down while I slept hoping that the misconfigured spider is fixed or the inept programmer discovers their mistake. Just another day in the Butlerian Jihad. Some misguided soul probably wanted to download it all and wrote a broken web crawler and when that got blocked they bought some nice scaling infrastructure from Amazon, Hentzner, OHV or Alibaba Cloud or whatever they are called, allowing them to use a gazillion different IP numbers that will eventually lead me to implement some sort of cloud service provider block. – Alex

Switched Emacs Wiki back on after a few hours of sleep and it did fine. But then it restarted again… at 18:00, 19:00, 21:00, 22:00… and so I have switched Emacs Wiki off again. Time to ban some networks!

Anybody interested in my banning of IP ranges and possibly interested in me reverting any of these, take a look at ban-cidr … from a network that isn’t banned, I guess. 😏

2024-09-17. This continues to keep me busy and angry every evening. Too bad I don’t have a real fast network-lookup to firewall ban pipeline.

In any case, I added over a hundred Chinese networks to the firewall rules and I’m seriously considering blocking the whole country for a week. It seems that most of the offenders are networks run by China Telecoms and China Mobile.

2024-09-18. So far, so good. Load stays below two.

Wow, spammers being mega achievers these days! Thanks, Drew Adams for sending me an email and letting me know. Some days I feel like we’ll end up banning all commercial hosting providers… Thank you all for fighting the good fight! EmacsWikiAdministrators can add entries to BannedHosts and BannedContent. When rolling back a page the wiki offers you to ban contributors and it lists all the URLs that where removed, both of which helps you add the necessary entries. – Alex Schroeder

2024-09-02. They are still at it. Sorry for overeager IP range bans. I’ll figure out the appropriate ranges when I’m back at a decent screen. If you can’t edit pages, look at the last few lines of BannedHosts and check whether that could be a problem. Send me an email at alex@gnu.org with your IP number if you think there was an error. – Alex

Ugh. Spam-fighting resulted in me adding a borked regular expression to BannedHosts on 2024-02-15. Regular users were unable to post as the script refused to save anything (and crashed). I hope it’s fixed, now. I’m editing this from a private browsing window and it seems to work.

– Alex Schroeder

Lots of spam-fighting today. Here’s what the wiki has to offer, if you’re an administrator:

• ban URL’s containing regular expressions via BannedContent (weird page name, I know)
• ban page content containing regular expressions via BannedRegexps (this is much more sweeping and I don’t like to use it)
• ban IP numbers using regular expressions via BannedHosts (regular expressions is a stupid idea but I never got around to CIDR matching)

Also, there’s a little helper that lists all the IP numbers and the usernames they used and whether they are already banned, e.g. ban contributors to Comments on SiteMap.

– Alex Schroeder

Emacs Conference 2021, today and tomorrow!