sysadmin

As promised in an earlier article about blocking server spam, here are some advanced tips on shutting the door to these resource leeches:

#1: Non-existent urls getting hammered:
This is can be a major problem, one which I believe has been at least somewhat cured in Drupal 6, but for Drupal 5 and below a request to a non-existent page such as http://yoururl.com/node/vote/ does not trigger a 404 page as you might expect. Instead the entire front page loads up. Annoying enough as it is, but when combined with a confused/malicious bot that continually hammers the non-existent url, the resource load can be enough to weigh heavily even on dedicated server, let alone a shared-hosting account. [note: there is an update in the comments below with more specific information about the versions of Drupal which are affected by this problem]