If you do not control or throttle end users, your server may run out of resources. Spammers, abuser and badly written bots can eat up all your bandwidth. A webserver must keep an eye on connections and limit connections per second. This is serving 101. The default is no limit. Lighttpd can limit the throughput for each single connection (per IP) or for all connections. You also need to a use firewall to limit connections per second. In this article I will cover firewall and lighttpd web server settings to throttle end users. The firewall settings can be applied to other web servers such as Apache / Nginx and IIS server behind PF / netfilter based firewall.
The round-robin database tool aims to handle time-series data like network bandwidth, temperatures, CPU load etc. The data gets stored in round-robin database so that system storage footprint remains constant over time. Lighttpd comes with mod_rrdtool to monitor the server load and other details. This is useful for debugging and tuning lighttpd / fastcgi server performance.
Geolocation software is used to get the geographic location of visitor using IP address. You can determine country, organization and guess visitors location. This is useful for:
a] Fraud detection.
b] Geo marketing and ad serving.
c] Target content.
d] Spam fighting.
e] And much more.
mod_geoip is a Lighttpd module for fast ip/location lookups. In this tutorial you will learn about mod_geoip installation and php server side examples to determine visitors country.
Now, mod_fastcgi is configured and running. FastCGI supports connection via UNIX sockets or TCP/IP networking. This is useful to spread load among various backends. For example, php will be severed from 192.168.1.10 and python / ruby on rails will be severed from 192.168.1.11. This is only possible with mod_fastcgi.
Debian 5 php5 package has serious security issues as follows:
To prevent Denial of Service attacks by exhausting the number of available temporary file names, the max_file_uploads option introduced in PHP 5.3.1 has been backported.
Recently, I had noticed lots of 404 error generated by my wordpress software. My old wordpress tag structure changed from:
/tips/tag/linux_software
/tips/tag/one_two_foo
To:
/tips/tag/linux-software
/tips/tag/one-two-foo
As a result lots of error 404 was dumped into my log file. I wrote a small php code to get rid of the problem.
Lighttpd supports both IPv6 and IPv4 protocol out of box. You need to compile lighttpd with IPv6 support. This small how to explains how to enable both IPv6 and IPv4 support under GNU/Linux / UNIX and FreeBSD operating systems.
