I now have eleven lines in my .htaccess file...
and the number of new comment spams actually posted in the last two days?
ZERO!
And the processor utilization?
Down from averaging in the eighties to in the thirties, and sometimes down into single digits - TOP and SAR are such wonderful tools!
I've even started approaching the management of the .htaccess file a little more systematically.
Once a day, I create a file containing the last 500 entries from the access_log file by executing tail -500 access_log > access_log.txt. I then take the access_log.txt and import it into an Excel worksheet in which I've created a pivot table. A quick refresh of the pivot data and resort, and I can see who the top accessors of the blog are. Typically, these are the big spammers. The one thing I do double check is what the typical action of these accessors is - I want to block the spammers, but not the search engine robots. Interestingly, while there are lots of addresses who will show one, two, maybe ten hits, there are only a few which show tens or hundreds of hits. Those are the ones which get added to the .htaccess.
At some point, I may even start paring down the MT-Blacklist blacklist, which I believe would speed up the comment processing and reduce the server load.
Of course the better solution would be to just bite the bullet and upgrade to MovableType 3.2, but that would be a pretty big learning curve, and I'd have to actually pay for it in order to manage all of the blogs I host. Yeah, guess I'll stick with what I have for now. Maybe I'll upgrade if I ever really get serious about blogging.
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Posted by David at November 15, 2006 09:33 AM