Banning IPs and/or Browsers using Apache

Posted: Thu May 15, 2003 2:04 pm (21 years, 7 months ago)

I wish to ban certain IPs and Browsers from going to any part on the website. These browsers are basically some robots which keep on trying to access some URLs like /cgi-bin/formmail.pl etc and lot of 404 errors get generated in return. How can I redirect those to some website like yahoo.com or simple serve them /disabled.html always irrespective of what they asked for.

Posted: Thu May 15, 2003 2:24 pm (21 years, 7 months ago)

Can't you have a robots.txt file at your site root with something like:

Code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin

I'm not sure if thats correct as it ages ago I looked in to this.

Posted: Thu May 15, 2003 2:31 pm (21 years, 7 months ago)

robots.txt won't do it, that only works if a robot reads it and obeys it, it doesn't stop access.

Posted: Thu May 15, 2003 3:34 pm (21 years, 7 months ago)

I was sure Mod_Rewrite module will do this
We use a ruleset which forbids the URLs of the webarea /specialarea/

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NameOfBadRobot.*
RewriteRule ^/specialarea/.+ - [F]

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

Is this what you're looking for?

http://www.engelschall.com/pw/apache/rewriteguide/#ToC37

Junior WebHelper Joined: 03 Jul 2003 Posts: 4

As for nulrouting IPs you can SSH in and

Code:

/sbin/route add -host <IP-number here> reject

This will kill all incoming and outgoing connections from that IP until you reboot the server. However, if you reboot the server, the null route is gone. If you would like to save the null route after rebooting to protect you in the future, just add the command to

Code:

pico /etc/rc.d/rc.local

and it will re-execute them when the server comes back online.

John

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

Unfortunately these days it is getting harder and harder to get shell access with hosting due to abuse Crying or Very sad

, but thanks for the tip! Smile

Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2003 9:33 am (21 years, 5 months ago)

also, I believe you'd probably need root access to do that...

Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2003 7:29 pm (21 years, 5 months ago)

jayant,

Could you use .htaccess

With something along the lines of

Code:

IndexIgnore *

in the folder you wish to preventing directory listing.

Mart.

Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2003 5:07 pm (21 years, 5 months ago)

to prevent a directory listings one has to use:

Code:

Options -Indexes

in .htaccess

edit:-
sorry for late reply. noticed this just today