Re: Interesting spamming tool: a robot to grab e-mail addresses

[Richard Kettlewell <]

Simon Wilkinson writes:

> One advantage of this technique would be that if the robot tripped off
> your alarms relatively early then you're (a) spared the wasted server
> load of the robot running loads of CGIs indiscriminately (quite a lot
> of these email harvesting robots don't both with niceties like delays
> between accesses)

Put calls to nice(2) and sleep(3) in your CGI program.  If you get
lots of concurrent uses of it, it's trivial to serialize them with a
lock.

I dont't think resource usage has to be a problem here.  l-)

Ideally you want to put more sleeps between the write back down the
socket to the client too.  (In apache 1.2.6 at least) there's enough
buffering going on to make this a bit mucky, though.

> and (b) spared them harvesting your entire server.  Robots which
> work in a breadth, rather than depth first fashion won't necessarily
> spend their entire time in the wpoison trap.

Very true.

ttfn/rjk