[Imc-web] Altavista netblock blocked

[Zachary C. Miller]

I just blocked all traffic to groogroo from all hosts in this range:

NetRange:   216.39.48.0 - 216.39.63.255
CIDR:       216.39.48.0/20

These are all hosts belonging to AltaVista Corporation and every time
our server has been flooded lately it has been due to bots from this
location. No real users come from these addresses, just altavista
search engine robots. These robots don't seem to have any limits on
simultaneous connections and they bring our site to a crawl on a
regular basis. I've been temporarily banning them on a one by one
basis but at this point I have to consider it an inadvertent DDoS
attack and ban the whole net range.

This means that our site will probably not be indexed in
AltaVista. This will not affect us being in Google or other search
engines which seem to have much more sane and polite robots. I will
seek other long term measures such as severely limiting the bandwidth
allowed to that netrange (don't cut it off but slow it down) but for
at least the next few weeks this is the best I can do).

-- 
Zachary C. Miller - @= - http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/
IMSA 1995 - UIUC 2000 - Just Another Leftist Muppet - Ya Basta!
 Social Justice, Community, Nonviolence, Decentralization, Feminism,
 Sustainability, Responsibility, Diversity, Democracy, Ecology