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Date:      Wed, 04 Nov 1998 07:05:06 -0800
From:      David Greenman <dg@root.com>
To:        "Mikhail A. Sokolov" <mishania@demos.net>
Cc:        freebsd-hubs@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: mirroring of ftp.freebsd.org (wcarchive.cdrom.com) 
Message-ID:  <199811041505.HAA29916@implode.root.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 04 Nov 1998 17:39:51 %2B0300." <19981104173951.09434@demos.su> 

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>On Wed, Nov 04, 1998 at 06:16:50AM -0800, David Greenman wrote:
># >Very unpleasant attitude towards mirrors. Even worse than Microsoft's, you
># > know.
># 
>#    In what way is it unpleasant? Abusive mirrors are a form of denial of
># service attack and I would remiss in my responsibilites if I didn't take
># action to stop it.
>
>People are either mirroring ftp.freebsd.org, or they do DoS attack trying
>to abuse ftpd. In the first case, the reminder to behave is offending, in 
>the second it's useless. If you once see somebody is abusing, you will
>kill/close the access for the machine [by default], since it's normal
>internet service which is being held by/with those unspoken laws to 
>close access in cases of offence. 

   First to address the second part of the above; I have no other recourse
in most cases than to temporarily block the site since 1) we don't log the
anonymous 'password' (for security reasons), and 2) the machines I often see
the abuse from have no reverse DNS, making it difficult or impossible to find
out who to contact about the problem.
   To address the first part, perhaps I am addressing the wrong crowd with
this warning, but I want to make sure that legitimate mirrors aren't mistaken
as denial of service attacks just because they've chosen to use an overly
aggressive mirroring strategy. We've never established any formal FTP
mirroring policy for wcarchive, so I can't presume that people know what is
okay and what is not. FTP/mirror is not a very good protocol for synchronizing
source trees. We've developed cvsup for that purpose and we have special
machines to serve it. With that said, there is nothing wrong with mirroring
wcarchive once or twice a day, or even more frequently if you ask first, but
if your goal is to keep up to date with -current, then I strongly encourage
using our cvsup servers for that.

-DG

David Greenman
Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project


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