If you noticed some really annoying slowdowns here on FtB over the last few days, we were being effectively ddos’ed by China. Not because we were a threat, but apparently because a Chinese search engine was being a bit overzealous and repetitive in slurping up links.
This situation has been corrected thanks to the efforts of our clever technical person, Alex. All hail Alex!
Thanks, Alex! Continually getting dumped on a cloudflare page yesterday was annoying.
HEY! I called it. yesterday ;-)
sorry to break my arm (patting myself on the back)
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/10/12/happy-indigenous-peoples-day/comment-page-1/#comment-977269
Thanks Alex!!! All the cloud flare errors were getting to be quite a nuisance.
Thanks, Alex.
Let me guess, http://www.baidu.com.
I checked on the Apache logs for my home server and it is getting a hit about twice an hour from there. This isn’t the first time I have seen excessive interest from that spider.
Hail Alex
Reminds me of the time UW: Madison was accidentally DDoSed by defective (well not defective, just designed improperly) routers. Grats to Alex for figuring it out.
Would this have ever happened if only FtB had more GUNS, and the GUTS to use ’em??!?
If the source was a Chinese search engine (singular), how was it a DDOS (distributed denial of service attack), rather than just a DOS?
@10 If it’s like Google or Yahoo they have multiple data centers, each of which have crawlers. (It could also be that common parlance doesn’t differentiate the two anymore.)
@11 I’ll go with the latter—no longer differentiated. The inexorable polishing of the language.
A Chinese search engine has a few tens of thousands of machines distributed around the world.
But now those of us actually IN China have to use a VPN to access your site.
Hurrah Alex!