[paninero]

Over the past week I have become very agressive with proxies on my sites, and blocking IP that are getting my hotlink image from my hotlink protection.

As a result my whole site is over 200% over 24, and I hit periods of 330% during the day, and yes that is my average. I got some trades giving me over 800%.

Bottom line these proxies are being used to create havok. If you want a good start, give my apf firewalls ruleset a try for a day and see if you notice any differences. Right away you will see that many trades will have prod drop. and then a day or so later the good trades will start to pick up.

Now I got about 7000 clicks per day, on about 3000 in traffic. My server is working alot less, people are happier with faster page loads, and actually my sales have gone up a little.

In my opinion you need to be dligent with the proxies.

http://hotdrop.oiik.info/deny_hosts.rules

[jack]

Thank you paninero

but you block not so many proxy for receive good result or you have other proxy list big than in your file?

[paninero]

Sure because 90% of the problems are centered in Asia and Europe and due to network lag to use another proxy here might not be as good, and although it seems that potentially there could be an infinite number of proxies, well there cannot be an infinite number of system where administrators are willing to give bandwidth to strangers, so it can't be as big as we perceive.

Again, a person will never kill the flow, they can always get around it, the idea is to keep enough away to stop running your site problems, and let the other 20% stay.

[siguy]

I am new to this, do you add this to your .htaccess file? also you are you blocking # America Online ? if so why?

[paninero]

I am blocking AOL because chances are I will not get credit for the sale, because they cookies are not always allowed, and also because their proxies tend to hammer my server.

And I use iptables, with the apf firewall.

[paninero]

Technically yes, but iptables is faster and I am not sure I would want a .htaccess file with that many IP's basically it will put a load on your apache.

[paninero]

Did you use APF firewall? You need that with that ruleset, but you could do a manual IP tables line, search the web, and just do a search replace on the file and remove comments.

[bracey]

I would like to do this but I have no idea where to start.
What is APF firewall? How do I use it?
Could someone please point me in the right direction?

[paninero]

APF Firewall is available here, and quite easy to setup, just read the documented help file.

http://rfxnetworks.com/apf.php