HTTP Referer Module

[Igor Sysoev]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 01:34:48PM -0400, Jim Ohlstein wrote:

> 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.

There are two cases when "if" works as everyone may expect:

   if (...) {
       rewrite  ...  last|redirect|permanent;
   }

and

   if (...) {
       return  ...;
   }


-- 
Igor Sysoev
http://sysoev.ru/en/