[Mailman-Users] CGI alternative?

[Jon Carnes]

Apache has some nice tools for limiting the number of connections on a
specific resource.  I believe that you can throttle on both requested
resource and on destination IP.  You probably want to cap the amount of
connections from any single ip address to something like 20.

There are also some nice firewall scripts that do the same thing, but more
drastically.  Once the number of connections from a single IP reaches a
defined number, the offending ip is denied access for 5 minutes (or whatever
time period you want).

Good Luck.  Let us know what you come up with.
----- Original Message -----
From: "kellan" <kellan at protest.net>
To: <mailman-users at python.org>
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2002 5:05 PM
Subject: [Mailman-Users] CGI alternative?


> Hi, I'm part of a team that works on maintaining lists.indymedia.org, we
> have a very large number of lists, a lot of traffic, and seemingly a lot
> of interest for robots, particularily badly behaved ones.
>
> Several times lately the server has started choaking and dieing, with
> loads of 70+ in response to some bot hitting all the listinfo pages, and
> firing up dozens and dozens of CGI processes.
>
> I was wondering if anyone else has struggled with this issue.  We don't
> want to simply block all robots, google can be essential to finding old
> posts on some of the high traffic lists.  So I'm looking for less
> resource intensive solutions then CGI.
>
> Has anyone setup the Mailman CGIs under FastCGI, or mod_snake or
> something?  How did that go?
>
> Also considering simply sticking Squid in front of it, anybody have tips
> on a Mailman friendly Squid config would be great.
>
> Am I missing an obvious solution?
>
> Thanks
> Kellan
>