Problems With Offline Explorer
Any long time readers (if there still are any) out there might remember what I thought was a D.O.S attack on this site, just over two years ago. You may also remember that in the update I posted I described how a user of Offline Explorer had unwittingly brought the server crashing to its knees. Yesterday it happened again. This time however, I was a little better prepared.
Whenever the $$ReturnGeneralError form is triggered on this site I get a mail (you can see how by downloading the DomBlog template). This normally amounts to about two hundred mails a day. Yesterday it was more like two thousand. This set alarm bells ringing. Yet again somebody had pointed OE at this site and it was having problems with this document which contained a bad search URL with the Contains keyword in it.
The first thing I did was edit the article and remove that keyword. This didn't help. OE had cached the URL and was trying continually to get at it. The mails continued to flood in.
Next thing was to post a request to stop the operation on the site in big red letters. This didn't work. I should imagine whoever it was had simply left the PC to it.
Then I had one of my increasingly rare brainwaves. It was trying over and over because it was an error 500. When it comes across an error 404 it simply gives up. All I had to do was hide the search view for a few moments and it would cease. Sure enough, less than a minute later, the server has one less thing to worry about.
A boring story, I know, but maybe a lesson in there somewhere...
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I've got a server (an over enthusaistic MS ISA server from what I can gather) that continually tries to get:
...?SearchView&Query=
That's no value in the Query argument. Similar to your problem, this return a FT search error which is caught be the default error form.
I would be great if the "error" page actually returned a status 404 as well as the custom error message...
Couldn't you utilise your IP Blocking - {Link} list to sort this person out?
How about putting up a document that only they see which says - "Oh its you, you're back are you, well on your way pal"!
What if the IP address isn't an individual user but say a caching proxy server or firewall for an entire company? Bit unfair to block the lot...
Pat's right Andy. IP blocking is anything but foolproof and almost always a last resort.
That aside, this person isn't really doing anything wrong. I don't condone the use of these scraper programs but I can't punish people for it either. It may be selfish but it's not necessarily wrong.
The problem here was my including the faulty URL link. Plus the fact that Domino can't handle the pressure ;o)
I promise to try to be as nice and pragmatic as you guys in future and not a knee jerk!