Relating to my last blog entry, I was quite surprised to see a message saying that my IP was banned when I tried to open Slashdot (News for Nerds) yesterday. The banned IP belongs to our proxy server so it means other users also can’t access it, though it seems that not many of them are regular Slashdot readers since I received only one complaint and that was from another Linux geek I know.
The page said that it was probably due to multiple requests from the IP. It also said that they are usually able to distinguish multiple requests through proxies from multiple (and most likely malicious) ones by individuals. Either they didn’t or there really is something fishy going on. The instructions said I should ask my proxy admin to contact them if I’m behind a proxy. Since I am the proxy admin, I checked the proxy logs and sent them an email asking them to unblock it or give me a solid reason for the ban.
Still no reply so I can’t read Slashdot unless I change the proxy IP or bypass my own IP so it doesn’t go through it. Well I did manage to read it, but only after logging in to another server and running “lynx”. I’ll try sending another message if there’s no response by this afternoon.
2 thoughts on “Banned by Slashdot”
Do you have an RSS aggregator consuming the /. RSS feed? They have a policy of banning IPs that access their feed more than n times per hour.
I don’t, but maybe a client or a few clients have RSS feeds. Will have to check the squid logs. Also looking into Squid log analyzers. The good ones I found required too many changes to a stable and mission-critical server (like installing Apache and MySQL) so may end up improving my current perl script. Doesn’t look like that much work unless you need lots of graphics and graphs.
Comments are closed.