- Generate list of authors on CGSpace for Peter to go through and correct:
```
dspace=# \copy (select distinct text_value, count(*) as count from metadatavalue where metadata_field_id = (select metadata_field_id from metadatafieldregistry where element = 'contributor' and qualifier = 'author') AND resource_type_id = 2 group by text_value order by count desc) to /tmp/authors.csv with csv;
- Abenet asked if it would be possible to generate a report of items in Listing and Reports that had "International Fund for Agricultural Development" as the *only* investor
- I opened a ticket with Atmire to ask if this was possible: https://tracker.atmire.com/tickets-cgiar-ilri/view-ticket?id=540
- Work on making the thumbnails in the item view clickable
- Basically, once you read the METS XML for an item it becomes easy to trace the structure to find the bitstream link
- METS XML is available for all items with this pattern: /metadata/handle/10568/95947/mets.xml
- I whipped up a quick hack to print a clickable link with this URL on the thumbnail but it needs to check a few corner cases, like when there is a thumbnail but no content bitstream!
- But in the database the authors are correct (none with weird `, /` characters):
```
dspace=# select distinct text_value, authority, confidence from metadatavalue value where resource_type_id=2 and metadata_field_id=3 and text_value like 'International Livestock Research Institute%';
- Looking at monitoring Tomcat's JVM heap with Prometheus, it looks like we need to use JMX + [jmx_exporter](https://github.com/prometheus/jmx_exporter)
- This guide shows how to [enable JMX in Tomcat](https://geekflare.com/enable-jmx-tomcat-to-monitor-administer/) by modifying `CATALINA_OPTS`
- I was able to successfully connect to my local Tomcat with jconsole!
- The worst thing is that this user never specifies a user agent string so we can't lump it in with the other bots using the Tomcat Session Crawler Manager Valve
- They don't request dynamic URLs like "/discover" but they seem to be fetching handles from XMLUI instead of REST (and some with `//handle`, note the regex below):
- I just realized that `ciat.cgiar.org` points to 104.196.152.243, so I should contact Leroy from CIAT to see if we can change their scraping behavior
- The next IP (207.46.13.36) seem to be Microsoft's bingbot, but all its requests specify the "bingbot" user agent and there are no requests for dynamic URLs that are forbidden, like "/discover":
-`Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36`
-`Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.97 Safari/537.11`
-`Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)`
- I'll just keep an eye on that one for now, as it only made a few hundred requests to dynamic discovery URLs
- While it's not in the top ten, Baidu is one bot that seems to not give a fuck:
- According to their documentation their bot [respects `robots.txt`](http://www.baidu.com/search/robots_english.html), but I don't see this being the case
- I think I will end up blocking Baidu as well...
- Next is for me to look and see what was happening specifically at 3AM and 7AM when the server crashed
- I should look in nginx access.log, rest.log, oai.log, and DSpace's dspace.log.2017-11-07
- These aren't actually very interesting, as the top few are Google, CIAT, Bingbot, and a few other unknown scrapers
- The number of requests isn't even that high to be honest
- As I was looking at these logs I noticed another heavy user (124.17.34.59) that was not active during this time period, but made many requests today alone:
210 "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36"
22610 "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64; Trident/7.0; LCTE)"
```
- A Google search for "LCTE bot" doesn't return anything interesting, but this [Stack Overflow discussion](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42500881/what-is-lcte-in-user-agent) references the lack of information
- So basically after a few hours of looking at the log files I am not closer to understanding what is going on!
- I do know that we want to block Baidu, though, as it does not respect `robots.txt`
- And as we speak Linode alerted that the outbound traffic rate is very high for the past two hours (about 12–14 hours)
- At least for now it seems to be that new Chinese IP (124.17.34.59):
- About CIAT, I think I need to encourage them to specify a user agent string for their requests, because they are not reuising their Tomcat session and they are creating thousands of sessions per day
- I emailed CIAT about the session issue, user agent issue, and told them they should not scrape the HTML contents of communities, instead using the REST API
- Run system updates on DSpace Test and reboot the server
- Magdalena had written to say that two of their Phase II project tags were missing on CGSpace, so I added them ([#346](https://github.com/ilri/DSpace/pull/346))
- I figured out a way to use nginx's map function to assign a "bot" user agent to misbehaving clients who don't define a user agent
- Most bots are automatically lumped into one generic session by [Tomcat's Crawler Session Manager Valve](https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/valve.html#Crawler_Session_Manager_Valve) but this only works if their user agent matches a pre-defined regular expression like `.*[bB]ot.*`
- Some clients send thousands of requests without a user agent which ends up creating thousands of Tomcat sessions, wasting precious memory, CPU, and database resources in the process
- Basically, we modify the nginx config to add a mapping with a modified user agent `$ua`:
```
map $remote_addr $ua {
# 2017-11-08 Random Chinese host grabbing 20,000 PDFs
124.17.34.59 'ChineseBot';
default $http_user_agent;
}
```
- If the client's address matches then the user agent is set, otherwise the default `$http_user_agent` variable is used
- Then, in the server's `/` block we pass this header to Tomcat:
```
proxy_pass http://tomcat_http;
proxy_set_header User-Agent $ua;
```
- Note to self: the `$ua` variable won't show up in nginx access logs because the default `combined` log format doesn't show it, so don't run around pulling your hair out wondering with the modified user agents aren't showing in the logs!
- If a client matching one of these IPs connects without a session, it will be assigned one by the Crawler Session Manager Valve
- You can verify by cross referencing nginx's `access.log` and DSpace's `dspace.log.2017-11-08`, for example
- I am interested to check how this affects the number of sessions used by the CIAT and Chinese bots (see above on [2017-11-07](#2017-11-07) for example)
- I merged the clickable thumbnails code to `5_x-prod` ([#347](https://github.com/ilri/DSpace/pull/347)) and will deploy it later along with the new bot mapping stuff (and re-run the Asible `nginx` and `tomcat` tags)
- I was thinking about Baidu again and decided to see how many requests they have versus Google to URL paths that are explicitly forbidden in `robots.txt`:
- Run system updates on CGSpace and reboot the server
- Re-deploy latest `5_x-prod` branch on CGSpace and DSpace Test (includes the clickable thumbnails, CCAFS phase II project tags, and updated news text)
- Awesome, it seems my bot mapping stuff in nginx actually reduced the number of Tomcat sessions used by the CIAT scraper today, total requests and unique sessions:
- This gets me thinking, I wonder if I can use something like nginx's rate limiter to automatically change the user agent of clients who make too many requests
- Perhaps using a combination of geo and map, like illustrated here: https://www.nginx.com/blog/rate-limiting-nginx/
- The same cannot be said for 95.108.181.88, which appears to be YandexBot, even though Tomcat's Crawler Session Manager valve regex should match 'YandexBot':
- Move some items and collections on CGSpace for Peter Ballantyne, running [`move_collections.sh`](https://gist.github.com/alanorth/e60b530ed4989df0c731afbb0c640515) with the following configuration:
```
10947/6 10947/1 10568/83389
10947/34 10947/1 10568/83389
10947/2512 10947/1 10568/83389
```
- I explored nginx rate limits as a way to aggressively throttle Baidu bot which doesn't seem to respect disallowed URLs in robots.txt
- There's an interesting [blog post from Nginx's team about rate limiting](https://www.nginx.com/blog/rate-limiting-nginx/) as well as a [clever use of mapping with rate limits](https://gist.github.com/arosenhagen/8aaf5d7f94171778c0e9)
- The solution [I came up with](https://github.com/ilri/rmg-ansible-public/commit/f0646991772660c505bea9c5ac586490e7c86156) uses tricks from both of those
- I deployed the limit on CGSpace and DSpace Test and it seems to work well:
```
$ http --print h https://cgspace.cgiar.org/handle/10568/1 User-Agent:'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)'
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2017 16:30:19 GMT
Server: nginx
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=15768000
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Cocoon-Version: 2.2.0
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
$ http --print h https://cgspace.cgiar.org/handle/10568/1 User-Agent:'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)'
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 206
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2017 16:30:21 GMT
Server: nginx
```
- The first request works, second is denied with an HTTP 503!
- I need to remember to check the Munin graphs for PostgreSQL and JVM next week to see how this affects them