Blocking Abusive IP Addresses with Iptables on Linux
Linux / Security

Blocking Abusive IP Addresses with Iptables on Linux

I’ve recently had some questions come up from some of my clients who want to know how they can block specific IP addresses that are abusing their web sites and server. In those instances where you want to block a particular IP from your server and are running a distrubtion of Linux, you can block the traffic from that IP address by using iptables. This tutorial will teach you how to set up, view, and configure a rule to block a specific IP address.

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Setting up and Using OpenDNS on Your Router
Security

Setting up and Using OpenDNS on Your Router

I’ve always promoted making your own personal network safe, and have been recently been working with family members to enable OpenDNS on their own networks, specifically the OpenDNS Family Shield which works great to block unwanted adult content.

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Block Bad Search Bots and Spiders Using mod_rewrite
Apache / Security

Block Bad Search Bots and Spiders Using mod_rewrite

There are many search bots, spiders, and content scrapers out in the internet. Some are completely legitimate like Google and Bing; however, there are also many that are overly aggressive or are simply out to scrape content or email addresses from your web site. Analyzing my own web site access log files led me to discover that there are several extremely aggressive bots that are hitting my web site frequently all day, that seem to have no true origin or search engine use and they were causing me some concern.

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