Comment on [PSA] Watch for the antiyanks troll and consider adjusting your rate limits
Sal@mander.xyz 2 days ago
Thanks for the heads up. I don’t know what ‘Antiyanks’ is, but I already had to ban one comment spammer.
The rate limits are indeed a bit confusing. The settings are:
Rate Limit: X Per Second: Y
I understand this to be ‘X for every Y seconds’
So, a ‘Comments’ Rate limit: 10, Per second: 60, means a maximum of 10 comments per minute, correct?
Maybe the reason you see 99999999 is due to troubleshooting. I have increased my instance’s limits multiple times while troubleshooting server issues, because the meaning of the settings was not clear to me. These limits are usually not the reason for the sever issue, but I put some high number and did not bring them back down after the issues were resolved.
I have lowered them now to more reasonable numbers. I will also be more strict with new applications for the time being.
So, a ‘Comments’ Rate limit: 10, Per second: 60, means a maximum of 10 comments per minute, correct?
Correct, per client IP.
Maybe the reason you see 99999999 is due to troubleshooting
Could be. I try not to speculate on “why” when I don’t have access to the answer lol.
I don’t recall any of them being from mander (unless they were dealt with before I started testing?), but thanks for taking preventative measures :)
I don’t recall any of them being from mander (unless they were dealt with before I started testing?), but thanks for taking preventative measures :)
I don’t know what ‘Antiyanks’ isIt’s the codename for a particular long-term troll and is based off of their original username pattern (which they still use sometimes). I have reason to believe it’s also the same troll that used to spam the racist stuff in Science Memes.
These are most of today’s batch (minus the JON333 which was just a garden-variety spammer that made it into the last screenshot).
No, they were not in mander.xyz. But I am generally quite relaxed when it comes to accepting applications. I mostly reject an applicant if it is very clear it is not an actual user, and then actively follow up on recent accounts for a short time. So the possibility of silent spammer accounts accumulating over time is always a concern.
Good to know, wink wink
So, a ‘Comments’ Rate limit: 10, Per second: 60, means a maximum of 10 comments per minute, correct?
Correct, per client IP.
Setting the limits to more reasonable values, like ‘20 posts per minute’, causes the server to stop serving posts. My front page goes blank.
So, I am starting to think that ‘20 pots per minute’ means ‘requesting 20 posts per minute’ and not ‘creating 20 posts per minute’.
I am still having doubts about what these limits mean, but setting reasonable numbers seems to break things, unfortunately.
I replied to your other comment, but most likely cause is the API server not getting the correct client IP. If that’s not setup correctly, then it will think every request is from the reverse proxy’s IP and trigger the limit.
Unless they’re broken again. Rate limiting seems to break every few releases, but my instance was on 0.19.12 before I shut it down, and those values worked.
Thanks! Yes, I saw both messages and I am now going through the NGINX config and trying to understand what could be going on. To be honest, Lemmy is the hobby that taught me what a ‘reverse proxy’ and a ‘vps’ are. Answering a question such as ‘Are you sending the client IP in the X-Forwarded-For header?’ is probably straight forward for a professional but for me it involves quite a bit of learning 😅
At location /, my nginx config includes:
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
So, I think that the answer to your question is probably ‘yes’. If you did have these rate limits and they were stable, the more likely explanation is that something about my configuration is sub-optimal. I will look into it and continue learning, but I will need to keep my limits a bit high for the time being and stay alert.
Sal@mander.xyz 2 days ago
Hmmm - after changing these settings to what I think are reasonable settings, the server crashed and I am now getting ‘Too many requests’ messages… So, perhaps there is something is not working so well with these rate limits, or I am still misunderstanding their meaning.
admiralpatrick@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Not sure. I had mine set to 20 per 60 for a long time without issue.
Most likely cause would be the Lemmy API service not getting the correct client IP and seeing all API requests come from the reverse proxy’s IP.
Are you sending the client IP in the X-Forwarded-For header? Depending on how your inbound requests are routed, you may have to do that for every reverse proxy in the path.
BlueEther@lemmy.nz 2 days ago
how did you fix?