HTTP Referer Module

[Jim Ohlstein]

Igor Sysoev wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 09:47:37AM -0400, Jim Ohlstein wrote:
>
>   
>> Hello,
>>
>> We just went through a period where someone was seriously leeching 
>> bandwidth. See the attached graph. It started just after midnight and I 
>> noticed it this morning and took care of it.
>>
>> We run a proxy on that server and someone was referring requests for 
>> YouTube videos on their site to be served via our proxy.
>>
>> What I did was to use a location block to return a nasty jpg to all 
>> requests that match their requests.
>>
>> location ~ /part-of-encoded-URL {
>> rewrite ^(.*)$ /bandwidth-leech.jpg permanent;
>> }
>>
>> You can see the results. The requests went away completely after a short 
>> while.
>>
>> I initially tried using the HTTP Referer Module but it seems it is 
>> designed to require a list of valid referrers and others default to 
>> invalid. Given the nature of my app, pretty much all referring sites are 
>> "valid" and I would rather be able to list "invalid_referers", perhaps 
>> in "http" section. Then I could add them to my list as they arose, and 
>> not need a location block for each, in each server. If there's a way to 
>> do this, I missed it in the Wiki and the Russian docs.
>>     
>
> server {
>
>     location /... {
>
>         if ($http_referer ~ ^http://(bad.site|another.bas.site) {
>             rewrite ^(.*)$ /bandwidth-leech.jpg permanent;
>         }
>
>         ...
>     }
> }
>
> This is a case when if/rewrite are good.
>   
I don't think I ever expected to "hear" you say that.

Thank you Igor.

Jim