2020-08-05 Abusing Soweli Lukin

A long time ago, I wrote Soweli Lukin, a web proxy for Gopher and Gemini. That allowed me to do some munging of the Gopher texts and render it as HTML, which meant reflowing long lines. That’s the main reason Gopher clients don’t work for me on mobile phones.

Soweli Lukin

Now, if somebody wants to crawl all of Gopher space, they can crawl Gopher… or they can use a web proxy. That’d be pretty aggravating, of course, but not inconceivable. There are, after all, lots of people not wearing masks and endangering others, I bet they’re also willing to write such crawlers.

Now look at that, for the logfiles of today and the day before:

root@sibirocobombus:~# grep soweli-lukin /var/log/apache2/access.log /var/log/apache2/access.log.1 | /home/alex/bin/leech-detector
                  ip       hits bandw. hits% interv. status code distrib.
      173.231.59.198      14956     5K  91%   -0.0s  200 (99%), 500 (0%), 502 (0%)
       XX.XX.XXX.XXX        629     2K   3%   -5.3s  200 (97%), 502 (1%), 500 (0%)
      XXX.XXX.XX.XXX        433     4K   2%   -1.4s  200 (99%), 502 (0%)
         XX.XX.X.XXX        221     7K   1%   92.9s  502 (68%), 200 (31%)
…XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX         16     5K   0%   25.2s  200 (56%), 500 (25%), 304 (18%)
…XX:XXX:XXX:XX:XXX:X         12     4K   0% 1756.0s  200 (100%)

Fifteen thousand hits.

Reminds me of 70.113.100.216 who was slamming Gemini space a few days ago.

Getting slammed by a client, on the mailing list

Well… I used ipset to drop their packets at the firewall, for now. Let’s see whether they change it, trying to make a comeback.

While I was at it, I also checked the IP numbers with requests in the hundreds. One of them was my monitor that checks whether the site is up, the other two were spiders with such promising names as “spider@seocompany.store” and “SEOkicks”. Ugh. Think of all the CO₂ wasted because of this SEO-💩.

​#Administration ​#Gopher ​#Soweli Lukin

Comments

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I took Soweli Lukin offline because some search spider was going crazy in it. The idiots running PetalBot did not deem it worthy to honour the “disallow” statement for Soweli Lukin.

– Alex 2021-03-14 19:02 UTC