> Collateral damage isn't really a concern with the Beta Cluster, it's
meant specifically for Wikimedia developers.

And quality assurance. My team's QA engineer uses a VPN, and he had to
request to be unblocked.

Note that this exercise of IP range whack-a-mole is nothing new to VPS
tools. I maintain two VPS projects (XTools, WS Export) that constantly
suffer from aggressive web crawlers and disruptive automation. We've been
doing the manual IP block thing for years :(

I suggest the IP denylist be applied to all of WMCS <
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T226688>. We're able to get by for XTools
and WS Export because XFF headers were specially enabled for this
counter-abuse purpose. However most VPS tools and all of Toolforge don't
have such luxury. If there are bots pounding away, there's no means to stop
them currently (unless they are good bots with an identifiable UA). Even if
we could detect them, it seems better to reduce the repetitive effort and
give all of WMCS the same treatment.

I'll also note that some farms of web crawlers can't feasibly be blocked
whack-a-mole style. This is the situation we're currently dealing with over
at <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T384711#10759017>.

~ MA

On Thu, Apr 24, 2025 at 4:48 PM Gergo Tisza <gti...@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Collateral damage isn't really a concern with the Beta Cluster, it's meant
> specifically for Wikimedia developers.
>
> Maybe we could just put the whole thing behind idp.wikimedia.org? I think
> that can be done at the Apache level. Making it more different from
> production is not great, but having to spend constant human effort on IP
> blocks is less great.
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