I see this issue has come up many times over the years, so sorry if I'm 
beating a dead horse, but unfortunately I have been unable to find any tips 
or resolution for my particular problem.

We host a web application on app engine. We create custom apps for 
different clients that all run on the same app engine code. We then use 
reverse proxy on these different client web servers to fetch the content 
from app engine. We use reverse proxy simply to mask the url to the domain 
of the client, not for caching. So we have a different reverse proxy for 
each different client.

We've been successfully using app engine for 3 years. Our app is very low 
volume, averaging about .05 requests/second.

After 2 years of successfully serving a particular client's app via reverse 
proxy on her server, Google decided that her machine was violating their 
terms of service and started redirecting to www.google.com/sorry/misc and 
giving the error message that: "our systems have detected unusual traffic 
from your computer network". Then after a day, it started working again.

This meant that her application was totally unusable for a day. We were 
given no clues about why this happened or how it was fixed. Google hasn't 
responded to requests for more info. We didn't find any malware on her 
machine. The help info 
(http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=86640) on 
the error message indicates that Google will deny service when it thinks a 
machine is violating its terms of service, including:

   - Sending automated queries
   - Using software that sends queries to Google to determine how a website 
   or webpage ranks on Google for various queries
   - 'Meta searching' Google
   - Performing 'offline' searches on Google

We didn't find evidence that any of this was happening. I also saw 0 dos 
api denials in the logs.

App Engine continued to serve content to our other reverse proxies without 
a hitch.

This is a paid app, and it seems totally unacceptable to me that Google 
determines who can receive content from my App Engine app. Even if her 
machine were somehow violating Google's Terms of Service, her machine 
should still be apply to receive content from my App Engine app. Her 
machine didn't violate my terms of service.

There are no spikes in traffic to our app, nothing to indicate a dos 
attack. The only thing I can guess from reading past posts is that for some 
reason Google didn't like the fact that we were reverse proxying content 
from App Engine. A problem with our proxy header format maybe? We use a 
simple Apache reverse proxy without caching. Apache forms the headers for 
us. Why Google decided to ban her machine after 2 years of reliable service 
with no change in traffic load or other infrastructure changes is beyond me.

Obviously the threat of App Engine randomly deciding to stop serving 
content to our reverse proxies is acceptable. If we can't get some 
transparency on this, and some information on how to insure it doesn't 
happen again, we'll have to move to another host.

Can anyone, Google or otherwise, give me some clues as to why this might 
have happened and how to prevent it in the future? Would turning on 
PageSpeed make a difference since the content would be served from edge 
caches and not App Engine itself?

Thanks for any help,
Peter


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