Re: Block IP (Apache Users)

Mohit Anchlia wrote:

On 6/5/08, André Warnier <aw@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mohit Anchlia wrote:

On 6/5/08, André Warnier <aw@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mohit Anchlia wrote:

On 6/4/08, Dragon <dragon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

André Warnier wrote:

Mohit Anchlia wrote:

2. Another question I had was sometimes we don't get real physical IP

of

the

machine but the IP of something that's in between like "router", is
there
a
way to get the real IP so that we don't end up blocking people coming
from
that "router" or "proxy"

In my opinion, you cannot. The whole point of such routers and
proxies

is
to make the requests look like they are coming from the router/proxy,
so
that is the sender IP address you are seeing at your server level, and
that's it. Your server never receives the original requester IP
address.

---------------- End original message. ---------------------

There are legitimate reasons for this to be done as well,
indiscriminately
blocking such access is a bad idea as it will affect legitimate users.
NAT
and IP address sharing are among the reasons. This allows an
organization
to
have a router with one public IP address to serve a larger internal
network
with private IP addresses. Without this, we would have run out of IPv4
addresses a long time ago.

Dragon

If there is no way to get the real IP address then how would router know
which machine to direct the response to. It got to have some information
in
the packet. For eg: If A send to router B and router sends to C then
when
C
responds how would B know that the response is for A.

You are perfectly right : the router knows the real IP address. But it

will not tell you, haha.

Seriously, this is how it works :
the original system sends out an "open session" packet, through the
router,
to the final destination.
The router sees this packet, and analyses it. It extracts the IP address
and port of the original sender, and keeps it in a table.
Then it replaces the IP address by it's own, adds some port number, and
also memorises this new port number in the same table entry.
Then it sends the modified packet to the external server (yours).
It knows that the server on the other side is going to respond to this
same
IP address and port (the ones of the router).
When the return packet from the server comes back, the router looks at
the
port in it, finds the corresponding entry in it's table, and now it knows
to
whom it should send the packet internally.
And so on.
So :
- the router knows everything
- the internal system thinks it is talking directly to the external
server
- the external server (yours) only sees the router IP and port, so it
thinks that is where the packet comes from.

That's NAT for you, in a nutshell.

Yes ?

---

Thanks for the great explanation. But, I wonder how do people design app
agains Denial of Service attack. Say Computer A uses Cox/Times warner
(cable) Internet connection and starts attacking B, then how would a
system be configured in a way that not all the users using Times
Warner/Cox
are affected. Should it be granular enough to give IP and source Port in
IP
blocking rules ?

I think that is quite a different case. Not all users of an ISP (like the
one you mention I suppose) are "behind" a NAT router that hides their IP
address. Instead, these ISP's have a large pool of public IP addresses
which they "own", and they attribute them dynamically to users when they
connect (and put the address back in the pool when the user disconnects).

If a DOS attack came from a router with a fixed IP address, and everyone
would know that this IP address belongs to company xyz, I'm sure that it
would not be long before company xyz would be facing a big lawsuit.

But in the case of an ISP, with tens of thousands of customers, each one of
which gets a different IP address each time he turns on his computer (and
anyway once per 24 hours in general), finding out who exactly was "
a234d-45hjk-dialin-atlanta.cox-t-warner.net" between 17:45 and 17:53
yesterday is a bit more time-consuming.

But in that case anyway, you do have a real individual sender IP address
when the packet reaches your server, so you can decide to block it.
And keep blocking all packets from this address for the next 24 hours.
And that's exactly what many servers do.
And that is also why sometimes you may turn on your PC at home (getting a
brand-new IP address) and find out that you cannot connect to some server
because it is rejecting your IP address. Chances are that you are unlucky
enough to have received today the IP address that was used yesterday by
someone else who used it to send out 1M emails.

But isn't this getting a bit off-topic ?
If you want to know more about this, I suggest you Google a bit on
"blacklists", "greylists" and "whitelists" for example.
or start here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSBL

Thanks ..it did go off-track a little bit and but it helps me understand
what I should expect when doing such a blocking. Thanks for your
explanation.

Now coming back on track, out of below 2 approaches which one is better:

1. Use "deny from IP" in <LocationMatch>
2. Use RewriteCond and call a perl script dynamically. This helps me
configure IP dynamically without having to stop and start servers everytime
I change httpd.conf

Is there any performance impact of using 2 over 1 or any other issues.