Well again, it all depends on your circumstances, what you want to achieve, how many accesses you expect, why exactly you want to block or allow some IPs, how many different IP's or IP ranges you would want to allow/block, how often they change, in function of what they change, whether it is a big problem or not for you to do an Apache restart, how loaded your system is expected to be, etc..
Mohit Anchlia wrote:
On 6/5/08, André Warnier <aw@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mohit Anchlia wrote:
On 6/5/08, André Warnier <aw@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:There will be a very big difference : in case (1), the IP addresses or
Mohit Anchlia wrote:
On 6/5/08, André Warnier <aw@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
the
Mohit Anchlia wrote:app
On 6/4/08, Dragon <dragon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
André Warnier wrote:Seriously, this is how it works :
Mohit Anchlia wrote:know
2. Another question I had was sometimes we don't get real physical IP
ofindiscriminately
the
machine but the IP of something that's in between like "router", isto make the requests look like they are coming from the
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
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,
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
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.
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
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
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.
ranges are pre-processed by Apache at startup time, and the comparison will
be made by an internal (and fast) Apache module, on the base of information
in memory. In case (2), not only are you using a rewrite of the URI, but in
addition you will be executing a script, which itself is going to read an
external file. That is going to be several hundred times slower, at least.
Thousands of times slower if you recompile and execute the script with perl
each time (if not under mod_perl).
Now wether it matters or not in your case, depends on the load of your
server. If it is doing nothing anyway 90% of the time, it doesn't matter.
An Apache restart may or may not be such a big problem either, it all
depends on your circumstances.
But rather than using a perl script, I would definitely in that case use a
mod_perl add-on module written as a PerlAccessHandler. But that's another
story, and one more for the mod_perl list.
I would bet that there exists already such a mod_perl module by the way.
Have a look here : http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/search?query=apache2&mode=dist
or, there is probably an example in the Mod_perl Cookbook
As per your suggestion I looked at PerlAccessHandler, how would this
approach be in terms of performance as compared to have "deny from IP", is
it still going to be really bad.
<Location /URL>
PerlAccessHandler Example::AccessHandler
</Location>
I will try running some test also.
Even if one solution looks like it is 200 times slower than another, but your server is only loaded at 10% (happens more frequently than you would think), and it really makes your life easier for the next 3 years, it's worth looking at.
And even if one solution is 200 times slower than another, that can still mean 0,1 millisecond, so is it important for you ?
A simple tip :
in the Apache configuration file, you can use an "include" directive, I believe just about anywhere, to insert at that point another bit of configuration file.
You could have a simple text file containing all your
Deny from 1.2.3.4
Deny from 2.3.4.5
...
lines, and include it wherever you want.
Then a simple Apache restart would re-read it.
A this file could be written and re-written by some external script which decides which IPs are allowed or not. Or edited with vi manually, if that is how often changes happen.
If you have a PerlAccessHandler under mod_perl :
- perl itself is part of the server, so it does not have to be reloaded each time
- the handler gets compiled once the first time it is run, and the compiled code is re-used afterward
- it can be smart, and only re-read the IP address list, and rebuild its internal table when the file changes
- and in the meantime, it uses the table in memory
So in that case you would not have to restart Apache, and any changes would take effect immediately.
Also, something else :
So far, you have been talking about blocking HTTP accesses at the Apache level. But maybe you want to block more than port 80 from those IP addresses, and maybe you should do this outside of Apache, before it even gets to Apache ?
There are many solutions, but you are the one to decide which one you implement.
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