Current website traffic is all about awards.
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Elmer Masters
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Elmer Masters
Eliminating bad traffic targeting Drupal and Solr
a short post-mortem on eliminating all of that bad search traffic that was triggering multiple reds throughout the day.
I put a number of vaguely regex filters in place on the load balancer and then redirect things to a Google search. We were seeing hits directly to Solr through Drupal on the order of hundreds per minute that put high loads on the entire web stack. Eventually this triggered failures. Since the URLs being used were easy to parse using only a few search terms repeatedly, building a rule to block them was easy. The bigger question was where to put the blockers. Ultimately blocking these attacks at the load balancer was the best idea.
An additional concern was the possibility of snagging legit student searches in the filters. This is addressed by allowing for at least some of the search filters to remain in place. For example, a search for “commercial lease” still works as do the drill downs by content type. If an attempt is made to drill down by topic after the initial search for “commercial lease” the rule is engaged and access is redirected to a Google search page for “CALI Lessons commercial lease”. By using the redirect to a Google search we offer a return path for any unsuspecting visitor doing a legit search.
Below are the lines added to the HAProxy configuration to enable the rules that block the bad actors from the site.
acl match_query url_reg /search/site/commercial%20lease\?f%5B0%5D=im_field_cali_topics.*$
http-request redirect location https://www.google.com/search?q=CALI+Lessons+commercial+lease if match_query
acl match_query url_reg /search/site/bar%20prep\?f%5B0%5D=im_field_cali_topics.*$
http-request redirect location https://www.google.com/search?q=CALI+Lessons+bar+prep if match_query
acl match_query url_reg /search/site/later\?f%5B0%5D=im_field_cali_topics.*$
http-request redirect location https://www.google.com if match_query
acl match_query url_reg /search/site/commercial%20please\?f%5B0%5D=im_field_cali_topics.*$
http-request redirect location https://www.google.com/search?q=CALI+Lessons+commercial+lease if match_query
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Elmer Masters
Working on CALIcon16 site.
- Adding Logintobbogan to get better user control.
- Flow is Register -> email verification -> add to C16 OG -> send happy email that includes session proposal stuff.
- Getting Rules to behave is kind of a drag.
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Elmer Masters
Here’s before:
Before the Front Page Feature makeover
and after:
After the Front Page Feature makeover
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Elmer Masters
Added a tweak to the LessonLink layout and approved for deployment next week.
Here’s a pic of the new create page:
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Elmer Masters
Finally on today’s list, a change to the layout of the Create LessonLink page to make the help text less annoying. No one likes to scroll to the bottom of the page all the time!
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Elmer Masters
Approved the changes to the front page feature layout. Will deploy next week.
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Elmer Masters
Next up, a fix to sort out the less than pleasing layout of the front page feature space.
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Elmer Masters
Works well, needs refinement to handle no runs in a topic and a link to My Lesson Runs. -
Elmer Masters
Reviewing code for http://www.cali.org. First up this afternoon is a feature that adds a list of Lessons run to the CALI Topic pages. It’ll provide an easy way for students to see what Lessons they’ve run in a given Topic.
