HTAccess Spring Cleaning 2009

Just like last year, this Spring I have been taking some time to do some general maintenance here at Perishable Press. This includes everything from fixing broken links and resolving errors to optimizing scripts and eliminating unnecessary plugins. I’ll admit, this type of work is often quite dull, however I always enjoy the process of cleaning up my HTAccess files. In this post, I share some of the changes made to my HTAccess files and explain the reasoning behind each modification. Some of the changes may surprise you! ;)

Optimizing a few rewrite rules

Here are some meditations for optimizing useful rewrite rules.

Improving robots.txt redirection

These changes were made in the HTAccess file for my WordPress subdirectory “/press/”. First, I removed the following robots.txt rewrite rules:

# REDIRECT ROBOTS.TXT
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots\.txt [NC]
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} robots\.txt [NC]
	RewriteRule (.*) https://perishablepress.com/robots.txt [R=301,L] 
</IfModule>

This code is now replaced with the following, more elegant directive:

RedirectMatch 301 robots\.txt https://perishablepress.com/robots.txt

Update

Thanks to a modification by Webrocker, this directive now works when placed in the HTAccess file of the root directory:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.*)/robots\.txt https://perishablepress.com/robots.txt

This rule is perfect to redirecting the hundreds of daily requests for misplaced robots.txt files such as the following:

https://perishablepress.com/press/robots.txt
https://perishablepress.com/press/about/robots.txt
https://perishablepress.com/press/2009/05/09/robots.txt
https://perishablepress.com/press/tag/blacklist/robots.txt

..ad nauseam. This sort of redundant scanning for nonexistent files consumes valuable resources and wastes bandwidth. Nice to know that a single line of HTAccess eliminates the confusion once and for all.

Improving favicon.ico redirection

Similar to the previous robots.txt directives, this chunk of code was also removed from my /press/ subdirectory:

# REDIRECT FAVICON.ICO
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/favicon\.ico [NC]
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} favicon\.ico [NC]
	RewriteRule (.*) https://perishablepress.com/favicon.ico [R=301,L] 
</IfModule>

While that method is certainly effective at redirecting those ridiculous favicon requests, I have since then developed a far more efficient technique:

# REDIRECT FAVICON.ICO & FAVICON.GIF
RedirectMatch 301 favicon\.ico https://perishablepress.com/favicon.ico
RedirectMatch 301 favicon\.gif https://perishablepress.com/favicon.ico

Update

Thanks to a modification by Webrocker and a bit of consolidation by Louis, these directives may be merged into a single rule that works even when placed in the HTAccess file of the root directory:

# REDIRECT FAVICON.ICO & FAVICON.GIF
RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.*)/favicon\.(ico|gif) https://perishablepress.com/favicon.ico

Here, I am using two directives a single directive to handle similarly annoying requests for misplaced favicon.ico and favicon.gif files. It’s just more pathetic exploit scanning by clueless script idiots, but this method works perfectly for stopping the desperation.

Dropping the hotlink protection

This one may surprise the die-hard anti-hotlinkers out there, but I think it’s for the best. For years, I had been using the following technique for hotlink protection (in both /press/ subdirectory and server root directory):

# HOTLINK PROTECTION
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}     !^$
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|bmp|tiff?|js|css|zip|mp3|wmv|mpe?g|swf)$ [NC]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}     !^https?://([^.]+\.)?perishablepress\.                       [NC]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}     !^https?://([^.]+\.)?moseslakeforum\.                        [NC]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}     !^https?://([^.]+\.)?deadletterart\.                         [NC]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}     !^https?://([^.]+\.)?augustklotz\.                           [NC]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}     !^https?://([^.]+\.)?perishable\.                            [NC]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}     !^https?://([^.]+\.)?monzilla\.                              [NC]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}     !^https?://([^.]+\.)?mindfeed\.                              [NC]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}     !^https?://([^.]+\.)?feedburner\.                            [NC]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}     !^https?://([^.]+\.)?planetozh\.                             [NC]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}     !^https?://([^.]+\.)?netvibes\.                              [NC]
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}     !^https?://([^.]+\.)?google\.                                [NC]
	RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|bmp|tiff?|js|css|zip|mp3|wmv|mpe?g|swf)$ https://perishablepress.com/hotlink.jpe [R,NC,L]
	#RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|bmp|tiff?|js|css|zip|mp3|wmv|mpe?g|swf)$ - [F,NC,L]
</IfModule>

And it worked great — never had a problem with anyone hotlinking my images. The funny thing is that, given the types of peripheral imagery and informational diagrams that I use here at Perishable Press, I probably wouldn’t have had any hotlinking problems in the first place. Sure, if I were posting killer pix of hot babes and fast cars, then the anti-hotlinking rules would be mandatory. But I’m not, and the esoteric little deco graphics and design diagrams just aren’t worth the extra processing requirements of the aforementioned set of anti-hotlinking directives. Besides, I keep a close eye on my access and error logs, so if someone wants to wipe strong, I am well-equipped to get tough on messes. ;)

Centralizing the 4G Blacklist

Also removed from my /press/ subdirectory is the 4G Blacklist. Over the course of the blacklist development process, my various domains had accumulated a disparate collection of blacklist directives. So, during this round of HTAccess spring cleaning, I removed the differently versioned blacklists from many different domains and subdirectories and consolidated everything into a single, omnipotent blacklist in the root directory of my server. Now, the directives are applied across all of my sites from a single, easy-to-update location.

One part of the removed blacklist that wasn’t released with the latest version of the 4G Blacklist is the extended collection of blocked IP addresses:

# BLACKLIST CANDIDATES
<Limit GET POST PUT>
	Order Allow,Deny
	Allow from all
	Deny from 75.126.85.215   "# blacklist candidate 2008-01-02"
	Deny from 128.111.48.138  "# blacklist candidate 2008-02-10"
	Deny from 87.248.163.54   "# blacklist candidate 2008-03-09"
	Deny from 84.122.143.99   "# blacklist candidate 2008-04-27"
	Deny from 210.210.119.145 "# blacklist candidate 2008-05-31"
	Deny from 66.74.199.125   "# blacklist candidate 2008-10-19"
	Deny from 68.226.72.159   "# 163 hits in 44 minutes"
	Deny from 86.121.210.195  "# 101 hits in 120 minutes"
	Deny from 80.57.69.139    "# 93 hits in 15 minutes"
	Deny from 217.6.22.218    "# quintessential images"
	Deny from 24.19.202.10    "# 1629 attacks in 90 minutes"
	Deny from 203.55.231.100  "# 1048 hits in 60 minutes"
	Deny from 77.229.156.72   "# 166 hits in 45 minutes"
	Deny from 89.122.29.127   "# 75 hits in 30 minutes"
	Deny from 80.206.129.3    "# relentless spammer"
	Deny from 64.15.69.17     "# 31 charcode hits"
	Deny from 77.103.132.126  "# 124 bg image hits"
	Deny from 80.13.62.213    "# 57 spam attempts"
	Deny from 91.148.84.119   "# relentless spammer"
	Deny from 88.170.42.61    "# relentless spammer"
	Deny from 220.181.61.231  "# relentless spammer"
</Limit>

I didn’t re-include these directives in the centralized root blacklist because every year or so I like to reboot my banned IP list and start fresh. Here is a similar IP-list dump from 2007.

Another part of the 4G Blacklist that was removed permanently was the “slimmed-down” version of the Ultimate User-Agent Blacklist:

# BLACKLISTED USER AGENTS
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent ^$                keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Y\!OASIS\/TEST"  keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "libwww\-perl"    keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Jakarta.Commons" keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "MJ12bot"         keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Nutch"           keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "cr4nk"           keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "MOT\-MPx220"     keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "SiteCrawler"     keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "SiteSucker"      keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Doubanbot"       keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Sogou"           keep_out
<Limit GET POST>
	Order Allow,Deny
	Allow from all
	Deny from env=keep_out
</Limit>

This was my 2008-2009 personal user-agent blacklist that included only the worst of the worst offenders as manifested in my error and access logs. The list is highly effective, but has been refined even further to include only the most heinous agents:

# USER AGENTS
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "libwww" keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "DotBot" keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Nutch"  keep_out
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "cr4nk"  keep_out
<Limit GET POST PUT>
	Order Allow,Deny
	Allow from all
	Deny from env=keep_out
</Limit>

If you only block four user agents this year, libwww, DotBot, Nutch, and cr4nk will certainly maximize your return on investment.

Ready for Summer!

Over the course of the previous year, I have had the privilege of learning a great deal about Apache’s amazingly useful HTAccess directives. The most important thing that I am realizing when it comes to optimizing your HTAccess strategy is that the old saying, “less is more,” is absolutely true. So many HTAccess files are completely overloaded with extraneous rules and pointless directives. Hopefully articles such as this will help you make wise decisions concerning your own HTAccess strategy.

About the Author

Jeff Starr = Fullstack Developer. Book Author. Teacher. Human Being.