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By lmacvittie
via devcentral.f5.com
Published: Jul 07 2008 / 14:32
After reading this discussion on Slashdot regarding an anti-virus agent pretending to be Internet Explorer and flooding sites with requests I waited to see a response come from an Apache fan on using mod_rewrite to detect and stop the flood of useless traffic coming from these robots. It was sure to come, particularly after the first post in the discussion pointed out how to use an iRule to detect and "nuke from orbit" these nasty little requests. I was not disappointed.
It's not the case that the solution won't work. It will, and it's certainly a viable solution. At least if you're only running 2 or 3 web servers. And you don't care about the need to interrupt service to implement the solution. And you aren't worried about potentially introducing errors into the server configuration. And you're aren't running IIS or some other web server.
There are a few very good reasons not to use Apache mod_rewrite for this kind of situation.
Comments
paul_houle replied ago:
silly article.
He forgets that less than 1% of web sites need, use or require a load balancing system, which his whole argument centers around.
He forgets that rewriting rules can be added dynamically to the server in an .htaccess file, not requiring a shutdown. he frets about the performance cost of rewriting, which is much less than the cost of dynamically serving pages in almost any situation: I've clocked rulesets involving thousands of rules at over 1000 requests/sec on a single Apache.
The 'heterogenous platform' argument rings false too. Perhaps a lot of IT shops that are forced to adopt 'the product of the day' are forced to run both Apache and IIS; but it still seems absurd that multiple instances of the same software system that are being load balanced would be run on Apache and IIS.
All that said, it would be nice to see something as simple as mod_rewrite that runs on a load balancer.
dragmire replied ago:
I disagree with pretty much everything in this article.
Long live mod_rewrite!
unchqua replied ago:
Hey! Too few to not use it :-) !
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