Comment on Admins: Instnace randomly running extremely slowly? Check for this

OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• freamon@preferred.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  PieFed has a similar API endpoint. It used to be scoped, but was changed at the request of app developers. It’s how people browse sites by ’New Comments’, and - for a GET request - it’s not really possible to document and validate that an endpoint needs to have at least one of something (i.e. that none of ‘post_id’ or ‘user_id’ or ‘community_id’ or ‘user_id’ are individually required, but there needs to be one of them).

  It’s unlikely that these crawlers will discover PieFed’s API, but I guess it’s no surprise that they’ve moved on from basic HTML crawling to probing APIs. In the meantime, I’ve added some basic protection to the back-end for anonymous, unscoped requests to PieFed’s endpoint.

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  • mapto@feddit.bg ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Could you elaborate on this:

    it’s not really possible to document and validate that an endpoint needs to have at least one of something

    In what sense it is not possible, as I can easily see it done in the code?

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    • freamon@preferred.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s straight-forward enough to do in back-end code, to just reject a query if parameters are missing, but I don’t think there’s a way to define a schema that then gets used to auto-generate the documentation and validate the requests. If the request isn’t validated, then the back-end never sees it.

      For something like https://freamon.github.io/piefed-api/#/Misc/get_api_alpha_search, the docs show that ‘q’ and ‘type_’ are required, and everything else is optional. The schema definition looks like:

      /api/alpha/search:
          get:
            parameters:
              - in: query
                name: q
                schema:
                  type: string
                required: true
              - in: query
                name: type_
                schema:
                  type: string
                  enum:
                    - Communities
                    - Posts
                    - Users
                    - Url
                required: true
              - in: query
                name: limit
                schema:
                  type: integer
                required: false
      

      required is a simple boolean for each individual field - you can say every field is required, or no fields are required, but I haven’t come across a way to say that at least one field is required.

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      • mapto@feddit.bg ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Ah, I see, so you are talking about this.

        Of course it is nice if things get auto-generated, but doing it yourself, both in code and documentation should never be excluded as an option.

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  • OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Good thinking!:-)

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• admiralpatrick@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Lemmy. I added a comment above LW wouldn’t let me edit the post.

  Mine’s only extended with some WAF rules and I’ve got a massive laundry list of bot user agents that it blocks, but otherwise it’s pretty bog standard.

  If instances have Anubis setup correctly (i.e. not in front of /api/…) then that might not help them since this is calling the API endpoint.

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  • OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    All of a sudden your edits went through - perhaps a delay caused by this same issue?

    Also some related posts:
    * another one reporting similar attack-like activities https://lemmy.world/post/36413045
    * a month ago similarly https://lemmy.world/post/34310429

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