ddos

Just wanted to post this here, since I've had to do this from time to time, and always had to read through the docs and try to build my own little example of it...

If you're trying to protect an Nginx server from a ton of traffic (especially from a limited number of IP addresses hitting it with possibly DoS or DDoS-type traffic), and don't have any other protection layer in front, you can use limit_req to rate limit requests at whatever rate you choose (over a given time period) for any location on the server.

# Add this to your virtual host config file.
limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=mylimit:10m rate=10r/s;

# Later, in a `server` block:
server {
    location ~ \.php$ {
        limit_req zone=mylimit;
        ...
    } 
    ...
}

I have had to do this sometimes when I noticed a few bad IPs attacking my servers. You can adjust the rate and zone settings to your liking (the above settings limit requests to any PHP script to 10 per second over a 10 minute period).

I started submitting my blog posts to Hacker News around 2016, but only ones I thought relevant to the HN community.

Until 2020, I would do this about once a week, and most submissions would fall off /newest within an hour, never to be seen again. But a problem arose (well, 'problem' depends on your perspective 😉): over time, more of my posts started hitting HN's front page.

HN is an interesting community—unlike Reddit, on which most material considered 'self-promotion' is verboten (because so much is spammy resumé-boosting or corporate material), HN encourages genuine self-promotion (at least judging by what hits the front page).