Re: IMPORTANT Message for all ACN Florida Mirror users

[Glue Sniffin' Ed <blah@blech.com>]

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On 25 Feb 2000 15:44:54 GMT, wbdesnoy@acs2.acs.ucalgary.ca (Byron
Desnoyers Winmill) spewed forth these incredible words of wisdom:

>I'm curious as to how this solves the problem of leeching?  Web
>browsers (at least the one on my Mac) can quite easily be enticed
>into "mirroring" web sites so many levels deep, in a particular
>directory, or in a particular domain.  There is at least one UNIX
>tool that will do the same.  
>

Well.........what this basically does is stop the people who use the
FTP hammering programs (i.e. bulletproof ftp, ftp racer, etc) that
first recusrively LIST each and every directory on the server before
downloading a single thing.  I have come home from work many times to
find people that have been connected for over an hour doing nothing
more than recursively listing each and every directory using one of
these type programs.  This system is a Celeron 400 with 128 megs of
RAM, as you may know....several people on high speed connections at
once doing this will definitely choke this machine down as to render
it almost unuseable.  Often times when I shut the server down to play
quake (yes...this is my one and only personal computer), I find that
I am extremely lagged, as one or more people have one of these auto
re-get clients hammering the hell out of me continuously from a high
speed connection.  I don't mind the "leeching", so much as I mind
that I cannot even shut the server down and play a simple online game
without my bandwidth being totally choked down to nothing by people
that irresponsibly set up these programs to try and log back on every
100ms or so.  I am well aware of some of the web browsers that can
make entire sites available offline, however, as I said
before.....leech everything you want...just don't hammer the hell out
of the site.  The login message on the FTP explains this, but for
some reason I guess people must not read these sorts of things.

>In otherwords, all that I can see this move accomplish is blocking
>the access of people who legitimately use FTP clients.

Yes...this is true.  Unfortunately in our society it is the few
irresponsible people that ruin things for everyone else.

All of these problems could be somewhat alleviated by a: a faster CPU
(not much improvement), or b: more RAM. (huge improvement). As you
may know.......RAM is the key factor in network operations on
servers.  Network capability goes up exponentially with the addition
of more RAM.  Something I cannot currently afford on my lowly pizza
delivery salary.

Thanks,

G.S.E.

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