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Date:      Fri, 12 Jan 2001 01:03:15 -0600 (CST)
From:      Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
To:        Christoph Sold <christoph.sold@server.i-clue.de>, jmitc2@chmc.org
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Limiting number of downloads per user in Apache??
Message-ID:  <14942.44083.319130.373010@guru.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <72820951@toto.iv>

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Christoph Sold <christoph.sold@server.i-clue.de> types:
> Jim Freeze schrieb:
> > 
> > On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, Paul M . Lambert wrote:
> > 
> > > On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, Jim Freeze wrote:
> > >
> > > > With php you can track a visitors ip with $REMOTE_ADDR.
> > > > This should identify the user, even with multiple windows open.
> > > >
> > > > Jim
> > >
> > > It would seem so (and one doesn't need PHP to have access to the remote
> > > address, by the way).  Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of people
> > > are behind internet proxies; AOL, for example, has many millions of
> > > members, but only a few hundred thousand ip addresses.  It's entirely
> > > possible that hundreds of different people using browsers on their
> > > own personal computers could have requests sent from the same IP
> > > address.  It's more than possible, but in fact quite common.
> > >
> > > There is _no_ way to track users in a foolproof manner.  Sorry.
> > >
> > Yes, I forgot about that.
> > But, I never like to say never...never. :)
> > 
> > Visitors can always be tracked with an id and password if bandwidth is
> > that important.
> 
> And it's easy to get just another five-minute-password, if you're really
> tempted to do so.

Cookies can also do this job - and having extra passwords won't defeat
that. Starting a second browser may; I'm not sure how the common
browsers handle sharing cookies between invocations, as they make
having a second invocation a PITA.

I'd be interested to know what's making this such a problem. I'm one
of those people who open multiple windows to fetch things. What I see
happening is that the first windows starts downloading full
blast. Starting a second one slows down the first one. Ditto for a
third, fourth, etc. I never see a noticable rise in the *total*
bandwidth I'm using - it's still limited to the bandwidth of the
slowest link on the connection. The first connection gets almost all
of that; having others open just spreads it around, so they all run
slower. For the really curious, I do this because it lets me make more
efficient use of *my* time; I start them all and can do something else
uninterrupted while they finish.

	<mike


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