Re: [savannah-help-public] 502: Fetching FreeType

[Bob Proulx]

address@hidden wrote:
> we've seen 502 Bad Gateways frequently when cloning
> http://git.sv.nongnu.org/r/freetype/freetype2.git recently (started a few
> days ago).  It's not really reproducible;  trying to clone again (right
> after a failed attempt) usually works fine.  It wouldn't hurt so much with
> humans but automated systems fail as well and in terms of OSS-Fuzz that
> means no updates of the fuzzers for up to a whole day.
>
> Is there anything you know / can do about that?

There has been "an abuse" (maybe not so far as an attack, I think an
attack would take us completely offline) going on the past few days
that is draining resources.  A large set of IP addresses is walking
through every web browsable link for every project.  This includes
cgit, viewvc, loggerhead, everything.  This has been going on since
the 14th.  Perhaps someone is trying to mirror everything in an
abusive way?  I don't know.  I have been watching it and trying to
mitigate it.  But there are a lot of IP addresses.

The result is that it starves the system of resources.  It consumes
processes.  It consumes memory.  None of the failures you are seeing
are hard failures.  Another attempt and they might get through the
queue ahead of the abusers.

The ssh:// protocol and the git:// protocol uses a different set of
processes and have their own process limits.  ssh being the most
permissive since that is a fully authenticated protocol.  I think
people using ssh:// are not noticing a significant problem.  Since
https shares with viewvc and cgit it is getting starved along with
them.

I am working the problem today and hopefully will be able to make some
headway at blocking the abusers soon.

Bob