Getting slammed by a client

[Solderpunk]

And my axe!

Errm, by which I mean, yes, gemini.circumlunar.space has not been left
out of this and I've seen just over 3,000 requests from that IP.

On Sat Jul 25, 2020 at 11:18 AM CEST, Martin Keegan wrote:

> I'd start with hardening Gemini servers ...

Yes, indeed.  The spec does have a status code (44) meaning "slow down!"
intended to allow machine-readable communication of a rate limiting
policy to bots.  Of course, it can be ignored by malicious bots, but it
should help against well-meaning but incompetent bots.  And, if nothing
else, serving up code 44 with no response body over and over again
rather than serving up actual resources should spare the server some
traffic, and also might slow down discovery of new URLs to hit by an
overactive crawler.

Anyway, to the best of my knowledge no server actually implements a rate
limiting scheme using this status code, but I suppose the time has come,
as it inevitably would.  Posts like this one have been common for years
on the gopher mailing list, which is precisely the reason I added such a
status code.  Let's see if it helps any...

Cheers,
Solderpunk