From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jan 11 23: 3:34 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4936F37B400 for ; Thu, 11 Jan 2001 23:03:16 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 60914 invoked by uid 100); 12 Jan 2001 07:03:15 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14942.44083.319130.373010@guru.mired.org> Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 01:03:15 -0600 (CST) To: Christoph Sold , jmitc2@chmc.org Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Limiting number of downloads per user in Apache?? In-Reply-To: <72820951@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Christoph Sold 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.