Corwin Brust wrote: > Richard Stallman wrote: > > Dora Scilipoti sats that /viewvc/www has been down for a long time. > > What is the situation with it? > > https://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/ > > Perhaps I'm confused; I didn't think this had been down especially in > the recent several weeks.
It might appear to be down but nothing about the system is broken as such. It's configured and working as it has previously been. The problem is that the system has been overwhelmed. It's up. It is processing requests as fast as it can do so. But it is overhwelmed causing things to be so overworked that they timeout before they complete. Which has the effect of bringing it down. But it does also work when the bots randomly give some rest to the system. I have been out of the country. I am back in the country home again now. No one has been working on the viewvc system. Because it's the same problem on all of the systems and if we can solve it for one then we can solve it for all of them. But haven't solved it for any of them yet. I am going to temporarily disable viewvc as a strategy to identify the bots that are currently hitting it. Because bots don't stop at a 404 Not Found error and keep going. This makes it easier to identify them. Identifying them may or may not help. One of the problems with a very large botnet is that each IP might only hit once a week! And that's much too slow for traditional IP blocking systems such as fail2ban to protect. So it all depends upon what type of botnet is currently the problem. Many sites are dealing with this onslaught of AI Crawlers by requring Javascript and including a Javascript challenge. Requiring Javascript is something that I am loath to do. But these are desparate times. Bob
