Peacebringers

The fact that people make money off of, and don’t find it offensive that they take part in the spamming of forums really annoys me. The fact that 90% of these spammers are from Russia, Asia, Africa, and other various countries is also highly annoying. I run a few websites which use phpBB3 for their forum software, and I consistently find them spammed. Setting the forum software to block requests from these countries is too time consuming, and I find it easier to just block them server side with an .htaccess file and a line stating something along the lines of “Deny from 94.0.0.0/8″ and then add another 50 IP ranges in CIDR format, some /8, /16 and some /23 or /24. No matter how up to date the software, spammers notoriously attack the system in question until they’ve been perma-banned with a null route, or hard coded smack in the face permanently denying them access.

I don’t like blocking entire ranges, as it punishes a few good visitors for the deeds of the rotten apples that also use that persons ISP. Sometimes, smaller countries only have one, or a handful of Telecom companies… block the Telecom, block the entire country. It sucks, but until those people find some way to retaliate and make those ISP’s take a stand on spam, I will keep having to block nearly every country except the UK/GB, Canada & the U.S.

Peace.

Just a quick note that I think any passers-by might find of interest: tuning-primer.sh. It a spiffy script that I use both at home and at work for a quick evaluation of basic performance tweaks that could be made to a MySQL server. It in no way replaces a DB Administrator… *knowing* MySQL and how to tune it is much preferred. However, in some case you may have a knowledgeable non-DBA working on your server and they may need help tweaking MySQL.
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