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Using fail2ban to block unfriendly web requests

Every time I peek into the webserver logfiles, I find quite a few 404 requests trying to figure out if certain exploits exist on this server. Now I get that these are automated attempts, and the number of requests coming from one IP show that they try several different exploits and path names. Nevertheless I thought that I don’t need this in my log, and on my webserver. fail2ban for the rescue.

 

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Blog website crawlers and bots in Apache2

Found a couple more bots crawling my website, and from the look at online resources it seems I catched a few of the bad guys. Crawlers which ignore the robots.txt standard, and just crawl a website for content.

Decided to do something against it, and added a filter in Apache2.

The way I have my webserver setup is that I have templates for every website (they all have different configs), and deploy them using Ansible. Parts of the website configuration which are the same, or at least similar, are handled by includes.

 

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Apache Karaf client in openHAB, and the "Session has been closed" error

Don't you love it when things suddenly stop working?

In my openHAB installation I have a check which verifies that the weather data is up to date. Otherwise it restarts the openhab2 service. And this check stopped working ... Leaving the kitchen display not updated for a longer time. The same display where I expect the entire installation to "just work", and don't create so many different problems. Seems to be a hard problem to have an openHAB installation without any trouble ...

 

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