[CentOS-mirror] Hundreds of requests for CentOS 2 isos from Chinese IP addresses

Sun Aug 31 11:07:06 UTC 2008
Shaun Ewing <s.ewing at aussiehq.com.au>

On 29/08/08 8:35 PM, "Mike Zanker" <mike at zanker.org> wrote:

> Recently I've been seeing hundreds of requests over a short space of
> time for the CentOS 2 isos, always from a single IP address, always
> Chinese IP addresses.

We're not operating an official CentOS mirror (yet), but we do notice
similar behaviour on our Apache mirror.

Sometimes we'll see up to several hundred simultaneous requests from a
single Chinese IP address (almost invariably Chinanet). It got so bad that
we had to put in mod_limitipconn to return a 503 server busy error code to
anyone opening more than 5 connections (the first 5 connections work, they
just can't open more than that).

That solved the majority of the issues. We still see the requests (error
code 503 has been issued 400,000 times so far this month), but at least they
can't take up all of the connections anymore.

-Shaun