fluffy rambles: No more Mx. Nice Enby

A couple days ago, the fucking crawlers ramped up their efforts to get past my 429 error page, so I finally set up a fail2ban rule that would block anything that kept on poking at things.Hoo boy that was the wrong thing to do. When the bot farms started to detect that I was blocking them at the IP level, they started a massive onslaught coming from massive coordinated botnets that came from everywhere, because apparently the bot networks have decided that if they’re being blocked, they’re going to do whatever they can to get around the block, and they were specifically only making a single request from every one of the tens of thousands of IP addresses.After several hours of frustration I decided to take this site down for a bit, and found that as soon as my server started responding with error 502 making it look like it was down for the count, the botnet slowed to a trickle. Which tells me that they don’t give a shit about polite requests to please slow down, but will stop when they…