Davion
Idle Hand
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#31 Posted Jun 26, 2009, 5:00 pm
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All Diku MUDs log the initial connection (AFAIK anyways). It's probably the only time someone sees the IP before gethostbyaddr is called and gives it some other value.
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Samson
Evil Overlord
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#32 Posted Jun 26, 2009, 5:05 pm
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Cratylus said:At the risk of derailing a bit and being forced to smell the glove, I have
to ask. Is it really common for muds to log the establishment of a
connection to the login port?
Sadly it seems to be more or less the default behavior of all Dikurivatives. Logging the initial connection even when no further input is passed to it. I got tired of seeing this sort of thing on Alsherok, largely due to listing sites who validated the game's uptime, but also due to people who left autoconnecting clients up and walked away from the computer. Then something would happen - we'd crash or a reboot or something comes along, and they'd be there, connecting like rabid fiends, once every 5 minutes as the clients would time out. Never trying to log on. So I coded around it and only logged connections from folks who actually went to the trouble of talking to the link. Log spam dropped by 90%. It's now standard fair in AFKMud, you'd have to code around it to get the spam BACK.
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Hades_Kane
Wizard
Group: Moderators
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#33 Posted Jun 26, 2009, 5:07 pm
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David Haley said:you are (or have been) very highly against the suggestion that people fix their logs.
You misunderstand, and at the risk of rehashing this again... I was against people continually suggesting to Mabus "fix your MUD" solutions when he made it clear that those weren't the types of answers he was looking for, that he was simply asking for a way to opt-out without having to modify his code.
I could go through and quote numerous instances of me actually agreeing that the solutions presented are in fact wise and a better route, if necessary, but I'm not trying to derail the thread a second time ;p
I was also merely suggesting that be a potential addition to the article on MSSP that if people don't want their logs to pick up on the crawler, that it might save them some work if some examples were provided, but again, I said to Davion "fair enough" in regards to his objections to it, and have dropped that since.
I'm looking to apply a particular solution to my particular problem :p
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Last edited Jun 26, 2009, 5:09 pm by Hades_Kane
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David Haley
Wizard
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#34 Posted Jun 26, 2009, 5:11 pm
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HK, I'm not sure if you're actually asking me a question or what you're expecting me to say, so I'll leave it there for now.
Cratylus said:I guess what I'm saying is...aside from Davion's fanciful imagining of anyone
ever having to make any effort to prove him wrong, what advantage is there
to logging things going bump in the night against your login port?
I think it's there only because it's always been there, and people have gotten used to seeing it. :shrug: Not trying to be facetious.
I have trouble imagining why it would be useful unless you're trying to debug something fairly specific. (e.g., are people even able to ping my port, before failing to log on)
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Davion
Idle Hand
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#35 Posted Jun 26, 2009, 5:12 pm
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Well, like I said. It's the only instance where the IP is visiable before gethostbyaddr changes is. Granted, you can just store the information for later, but no one does. So if you actually want the IP of someone, you'll have to keep it in or set up some other form of logging them.
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Hades_Kane
Wizard
Group: Moderators
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#37 Posted Jun 26, 2009, 5:21 pm
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David Haley said:HK, I'm not sure if you're actually asking me a question or what you're expecting me to say, so I'll leave it there for now.
I can't help but to feel that words were being placed in my mouth that never did come out, due to a likely misinterpretation of my stance in that other thread. Particularly in a medium like text where so much can be lost and misinterpreted, I think it necessary at times to try to be as concise as possible and take any opportunity to clear up any misunderstanding.
I don't want anyone thinking that I was advocating the position that "fix your MUD" solutions were bad. It was simply a matter of Mabus not looking for that, and in my opinion everyone trying to cram that down his throat while ignoring his initial question/request along with subsequent "that's not what I'm looking for" statements.
I hope this clears up any confusion on the matter, which is my -only- agenda in continuing to post about it.
On the IP logging, I find it useful to be able to see the initial connection attempts for at least a few reasons. Off of the top of my head, sometimes I recognize the IP of someone connecting I don't want to deal with, and its easier to go wizi in the time from their initial connection and presence within the game than it is from the moment they actually log in. I find it useful to know whether someone is attempting to spam the MUD with continued connections, I find it useful to have that in place when a banned IP or player attempts to connect... I'll admit there is a bit of "its always been there" mentality, and there's been very, very few instances of it being a problem. Thus far, there's only been one instance I can think of with it being a problem from someone purposely abusing it (and I think we know all what that instance was), and maybe only about 2 other instances of there being an accidental situation that made it undesirable (the bug in the crawler, and once instance of someone with an auto-connect on their client that didn't have an auto login script).
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......................... -Diablos of End of Time, eotmud.com:4000, Final Fantasy themed -- Seeking Builders! For more info visit: http://www.eotmud.com/
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Davion
Idle Hand
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#38 Posted Jun 26, 2009, 5:23 pm
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Oh. Extremely easy! Never said it wasn't. I however perfer my logs to be as verbose as possible, though. In my system, I log the IP to a new variable on the descriptor_data, as well as print out that initial sinaddr report.
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Igabod
Wizard
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#39 Posted Jun 27, 2009, 4:05 am
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man oh man I don't think I've ever seen a thread with as much repetition on it. You guys are simply going over what has been said already adding very little to what has already been said... and you're repeating yourselves a lot too. So much redundancy. Oh yeah, and everything that has already been said is being said again. Repetitive redundancy is repetitious.
Does anybody else see what I'm talking about here?
I personally don't have this problem because my mud isn't listed anywhere at the moment, but I am very interested in finding a way to opt out or reduce frequency without having to implement MSSP. Hopefully you guys can add some new points to the conversation here and get it solved.
I'm not exactly skilled enough of a coder to know how this all works, but is there a way to just have a file called crawler.c or something in the mud that holds the data such as crawler_frequency? I'm thinking it might not be possible but I could be wrong so I decided to put this idea out there for the more skilled coders to debate over.
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flumpy
Sorcerer
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#40 Posted Jun 27, 2009, 6:21 am
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Igabod said:
Does anybody else see what I'm talking about here?
absolutely - yawn. which is why i haven't contributed to this thread really.
Igabod said:
I personally don't have this problem because my mud isn't listed anywhere at the moment, but I am very interested in finding a way to opt out or reduce frequency without having to implement MSSP. Hopefully you guys can add some new points to the conversation here and get it solved.
I'm not exactly skilled enough of a coder to know how this all works, but is there a way to just have a file called crawler.c or something in the mud that holds the data such as crawler_frequency? I'm thinking it might not be possible but I could be wrong so I decided to put this idea out there for the more skilled coders to debate over.
I don't think this is possible. If the the connection is via telnet, would anyone else be able to find that file?
Oh and as a web developers point of view to the whole DOS thing, unfortunately mud applications are NOT web pages. There is a world of difference between a web server serving a single page and an application that uses telnet and multithreading to serve mud content. If I had a single web app that was being crawled every two minutes*, it would seriously degrade the performance of my application for other people. Thats why we have load balancers, multiple web app instances, content cache and apache servers that choose when to submit requests to the web apps and what to serve.
Just my tuppence, no offence or inference meant to anyone ;)
[edit - *well, maybe not every two minutes, that would be quite a long gap really. I might be more concerned about bandwidth depending on the content that required serving..]
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Last edited Jun 27, 2009, 6:25 am by flumpy
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Lyanic
Sorcerer
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#42 Posted Jun 27, 2009, 1:34 pm
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David Haley said:Cratylus said:I guess what I'm saying is...aside from Davion's fanciful imagining of anyone
ever having to make any effort to prove him wrong, what advantage is there
to logging things going bump in the night against your login port?
I think it's there only because it's always been there, and people have gotten used to seeing it. :shrug: Not trying to be facetious.
I have trouble imagining why it would be useful unless you're trying to debug something fairly specific. (e.g., are people even able to ping my port, before failing to log on)
Hades_Kane said:On the IP logging, I find it useful to be able to see the initial connection attempts for at least a few reasons. Off of the top of my head, sometimes I recognize the IP of someone connecting I don't want to deal with, and its easier to go wizi in the time from their initial connection and presence within the game than it is from the moment they actually log in. I find it useful to know whether someone is attempting to spam the MUD with continued connections, I find it useful to have that in place when a banned IP or player attempts to connect...
I have to agree with HK here. There are a lot of useful reasons for being able to see the process of someone attempting to connect (even more than the ones HK already mentioned). Still, I don't find this whole ordeal over the connection frequencies of MSSP crawlers to be an issue. Seeing one connection every couple minutes (and that being when there was a bug) is no big deal. If I absolutely could not stand it anyway, I'd just filter that single IP from logging. If it actually did devolve into something constituting a DoS, I'd block it. These are rare enough occurrences that dealing with them on a case by case basis won't significantly increase administrative workload. I very much agree with the "public port on the internet" philosophy that has been espoused throughout this debate, and I think certain people are just trying to argue for the sake of arguing at this point.
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