Yesterday I talked about how to cache RSS feeds in PyBlosxom using only mod_rewrite, a cron job, and a package of hostess twinkies. Today, I’m going a little further. I’ve been having problems with link spammers hitting my pages and using up my bandwidth. I’m pretty sure they’re all coming from the same source, but they’re not the same block of IP addresses, maybe they’re zombied. Anyway, the urls are all terribly predictable like http://www.car-insurancedeals-4u.info/ or something like that. Anyway, they’re all .info domains with multiple dashes in the domain name. Being as there are basically no legitimate .info or .biz sites, I can guarantee that someone is up to no good. On the offhand that you are .info site that would like to link to me, I can allow the link by changing my config. Just email me.
Anyway, I whipped up a bit more mod_rewrite fun to look at the referer and if they’re from one of these “sites”, then it sends them a forbidden error. Should help save some bandwidth and also stop these idiots from appearing all the time in my logs.
:::apache
# Ban link spammers
# this stops any domain of the form: xxx-xxx.info (or derivitave of that)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*(-.*)+\.info/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F]
I realize that this has the potential to turn into an arms race. Oh well. Maybe some day I’ll get around to building a better firewall for my network and have this all done through pf or layer 7 filtering or something like that.