Server Too Busy

[Sage]

I will, Lorax. I expect he'll call Saturday. Where he works, a 12 hour day is expected but he rarely gets away with just 12 hrs and he worked through the weekend last week so he called yesterday to catch up. This is bizarre. This is the new world. This company brings in lunch and sends around a menu for you to order dinner from. Sounds like slavery to me.

[suunto]

Originally Posted by Sage

I will, Lorax. I expect he'll call Saturday. Where he works, a 12 hour day is expected but he rarely gets away with just 12 hrs and he worked through the weekend last week so he called yesterday to catch up. This is bizarre. This is the new world. This company brings in lunch and sends around a menu for you to order dinner from. Sounds like slavery to me.

\
Likewise with the family member I'm trying to contact - he too has a schedule that only a slave driver would find acceptable - in addition to long work days, he's 'on call' nearly 24/7...

[Sage]

Lorax, please PM or email me a concise description of the issue and I'll send it to him so perhaps he'll be able to find a solutions or someone who would likely have some answers during the week.

suunto, are we related?

[TheLorax]

Thank you Suunto.
Thank you Sage.

A concise description is shared in this thread. Post 32 is a very good summation.

This information my be useful-
Server Type Linux
Web Server Apache v2.2.9
PHP 5.2.17
PHP Maximum Upload Size 10.00 MB
PHP Memory Limit 32.00 MB
MySQL Version 5.1.54
MySQL Packet Size 1.00 MB

vBulletin Version 3.8.4
Search Engine Friendly URLs by vBSEO 3.3.2

[Sage]

Thanks, Lorax. I just got the email off to him and will count on his liking to research stuff or possibly knowing someone more familiar with this issue.

[philip]

I guess I know very little about vBulletin, but Lorax, you mentioned that these bots are showing up in threads with certain keywords?

This seems to imply that they are running searches to find these words. If you limit the number of searches any one user can make to one every 90 seconds say, or more even, then this might slow them down.

Another trick I used was greping through logs to find an idea of which subnets these attacks are coming from. And then just banning those subnets.

At one point I just banned China, Russia, and a couple of other places that looked dodgy. I simply felt that the number of legit Russians needing to access the site was low to none, and the risk was high.

I'd also use a tool that worked with IPtables (Linux's firewall) that would blacklist anyone that used a wrong passwd on an ssh connection too many times. There might be something out there that can do something similar for you guys. (Ie a dynamic watcher and IP blocker.)

Another trick I would use would be getting whitelists, or blacklists from the web. These are lists of well known bad blocks of IPs (black) or the really hard line approach is to ban everyone except a certain range of IPs.

http://perishablepress.com/press/200...s-mod_rewrite/

[havalotta]

YEY!!!!
Thank you, Thank youThank youto those of you who have been doing such a great job
at keeping that pesty server's busy at bay.

[Sage]

How did you do it?