CGSpace Notes

Documenting day-to-day work on the CGSpace repository.

September, 2022

in  Notes

2022-09-01

  • A bit of work on the “Mapping CG Core–CGSpace–MEL–MARLO Types” spreadsheet
  • I tested an item submission on DSpace Test with the Cocoon org.apache.cocoon.uploads.autosave=false change
    • The submission works as expected
  • Start debugging some region-related issues with csv-metadata-quality
    • I created a new test file test-geography.csv with some different scenarios
    • I also fixed a few bugs and improved the region-matching logic

2022-09-02

  • I worked a bit more on exclusion and skipping logic in csv-metadata-quality
    • I also pruned and updated all the Python dependencies
    • Then I released version 0.6.0 now that the excludes and region matching support is working way better

2022-09-05

  • Started a harvest on AReS last night
  • Looking over the Solr statistics from last month I see many user agents that look suspicious:
    • Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C)
    • Mozilla / 5.0(Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit / 537.36(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome / 77.0.3865.90 Safari / 537.36
    • Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
    • Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b12pre) Gecko/20110204 Firefox/4.0b12pre
    • Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; Xbox; Xbox One) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edge/44.18363.8131
    • Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
    • Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.5; Windows 98;)
    • curb
    • bitdiscovery
    • omgili/0.5 +http://omgili.com
    • Mozilla/5.0 (compatible)
    • Vizzit
    • Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
    • Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:13.0) Gecko/13.0 Firefox/13.0
    • Java/17-ea
    • AdobeUxTechC4-Async/3.0.12 (win32)
    • ZaloPC-win32-24v473
    • Mozilla/5.0/Firefox/42.0 - nbertaupete95(at)gmail.com
    • Scoop.it
    • Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0
    • Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
    • ows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv: 50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
    • WebAPIClient
    • Mozilla/5.0 Firefox/26.0
    • Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; woorankreview/2.0; +https://www.woorank.com/)
  • For example, some are apparently using versions of Firefox that are over ten years old, and some are obviously trying to look like valid user agents, but making typos (Mozilla / 5.0)
  • Tons of hosts making requests likt this:
GET /bitstream/handle/10568/109408/Milk%20testing%20lab%20protocol.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=\x22><script%20>alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83))</script> HTTP/1.1" 400 5 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
  • I got a list of hosts making requests like that so I can purge their hits:
# zcat /var/log/nginx/{access,library-access,oai,rest}.log.[123]*.gz | grep 'String.fromCharCode(' | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u > /tmp/ips.txt 

$ awk '{print $1}' /tmp/hetzner.txt | wc -l
36
$ sort -u /tmp/hetzner-combined.txt  | wc -l
49
  • I will add this new list to nginx’s bot-networks.conf so they get throttled on scraping XMLUI and get classified as bots in Solr statistics
  • Then I purged hits from the following user agents:
$ ./ilri/check-spider-hits.sh -f /tmp/agents
Found 374 hits from curb in statistics
Found 350 hits from bitdiscovery in statistics
Found 564 hits from omgili in statistics
Found 390 hits from Vizzit in statistics
Found 9125 hits from AdobeUxTechC4-Async in statistics
Found 97 hits from ZaloPC-win32-24v473 in statistics
Found 518 hits from nbertaupete95 in statistics
Found 218 hits from Scoop.it in statistics
Found 584 hits from WebAPIClient in statistics

Total number of hits from bots: 12220
  • Then I will add these user agents to the ILRI spider override in DSpace

2022-09-06

  • I’m testing dspace-statistics-api with our DSpace 7 test server
    • After setting up the env and the database the python -m dspace_statistics_api.indexer runs without issues
    • While playing with Solr I tried to search for statistics from this month using time:2022-09* but I get this error: “Can’t run prefix queries on numeric fields”
    • I guess that the syntax in Solr changed since 4.10…
    • This works, but is super annoying: time:[2022-09-01T00:00:00Z TO 2022-09-30T23:59:59Z]

2022-09-07

  • I tested the controlled-vocabulary changes on DSpace 6 and they work fine
    • Last week I found that DSpace 7 is more strict with controlled vocabularies and requires IDs for all node values
    • This is a pain because it means I have to re-do the IDs in each file every time I update them
    • If I add id="0000" to each, then I can use this vim expression let i=0001 | g/0000/s//\=i/ | let i=i+1 to replace the numbers with increments starting from 1
  • Meeting with Marie Angelique, Abenet, Sarа, аnd Margarita to continue the discussion about Types from last week
    • We made progress with concrete actions and will continue next week

2022-09-08

  • I had a meeting with Nicky from UNEP to discuss issues they are having with their DSpace
    • I told her about the meeting of DSpace community people that we’re planning at ILRI in the next few weeks

2022-09-09

  • Add some value mappings to AReS because I see a lot of incorrect regions and countries
  • I also found some values that were blank in CGSpace so I deleted them:
dspace=# BEGIN;
BEGIN
dspace=# DELETE FROM metadatavalue WHERE dspace_object_id IN (SELECT uuid FROM item) AND text_value='';
DELETE 70
dspace=# COMMIT;
COMMIT
  • Start a full Discovery index on CGSpace to catch these changes in the Discovery

2022-09-11

  • Today is Sunday and I see the load on the server is high
    • Google and a bunch of other bots have been blocked on XMLUI for the past two weeks so it’s not from them!
    • Looking at the top IPs this morning:
# cat /var/log/nginx/{access,library-access,oai,rest}.log /var/log/nginx/{access,library-access,oai,rest}.log.1 | grep '11/Sep/2022' | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -h | tail -n 40
...
    165 64.233.172.79
    166 87.250.224.34
    200 69.162.124.231
    202 216.244.66.198
    385 207.46.13.149
    398 207.46.13.147
    421 66.249.64.185
    422 157.55.39.81
    442 2a01:4f8:1c17:5550::1
    451 64.124.8.36
    578 137.184.159.211
    597 136.243.228.195
   1185 66.249.64.183
   1201 157.55.39.80
   3135 80.248.237.167
   4794 54.195.118.125
   5486 45.5.186.2
   6322 2a01:7e00::f03c:91ff:fe9a:3a37
   9556 66.249.64.181
  • The top is still Google, but all the requests are HTTP 503 because I classified them as bots for XMLUI at least
  • Then there’s 80.248.237.167, which is using a normal user agent and scraping Discovery
    • That IP is on Internet Vikings aka Internetbolaget and we are already marking that subnet as ‘bot’ for XMLUI so most of these requests are HTTP 503
  • On another note, I’m curious to explore enabling caching of certain REST API responses
    • For example, where the use is for harvesting rather than actual clients getting bitstreams or thumbnails, it seems there might be a benefit to speeding these up for subsequent requestors:
# awk '{print $7}' /var/log/nginx/rest.log | grep -v retrieve | sort | uniq -c | sort -h | tail -n 10
      4 /rest/items/3f692ddd-7856-4bf0-a587-99fb3df0688a/bitstreams
      4 /rest/items/3f692ddd-7856-4bf0-a587-99fb3df0688a/metadata
      4 /rest/items/b014e36f-b496-43d8-9148-cc9db8a6efac/bitstreams
      4 /rest/items/b014e36f-b496-43d8-9148-cc9db8a6efac/metadata
      5 /rest/handle/10568/110310?expand=all
      5 /rest/handle/10568/89980?expand=all
      5 /rest/handle/10568/97614?expand=all
      6 /rest/handle/10568/107086?expand=all
      6 /rest/handle/10568/108503?expand=all
      6 /rest/handle/10568/98424?expand=all
  • I specifically have to not cache things like requests for bitstreams because those are from actual users and we need to keep the real requests so we get the statistics hit
    • Will be interesting to check the results above as the day goes on (now 10AM)
    • To estimate the potential savings from caching I will check how many non-bitstream requests are made versus how many are made more than once (updated the next morning using yesterday’s log):
# awk '{print $7}' /var/log/nginx/rest.log.1 | grep -v retrieve | sort -u | wc -l
33733
# awk '{print $7}' /var/log/nginx/rest.log.1 | grep -v retrieve | sort | uniq -c | awk '$1 > 1' | wc -l
5637
  • In the afternoon I started a harvest on AReS (which should affect the numbers above also)
  • I enabled an nginx proxy cache on DSpace Test for this location regex: location ~ /rest/(handle|items|collections|communities)/.+

2022-09-12

  • I am testing harvesting DSpace Test via AReS with the nginx proxy cache enabled