Limiting Bots in a Windows server environment
Kyle Breneman
We are running ArchivesSpace on Windows Server 2019, and we’ve been having sporadic difficulty, since August 2024, with bots overwhelming the Jetty webserver and crashing the frontend. So far, we’ve put in place a robots.txt file and put in place firewall rules to block a small handful of individual IP addresses.
I found this code4lib article a few weeks ago, and it offers some interesting solutions, although we cannot use fail2ban because it is a Linux app, and our web developer is not enthusiastic about Cloudflare. (I see now that there are some Windows alternatives to fail2ban; I’ll check into those.)
Is anyone out there running ArchivesSpace on a Windows server and experiencing success in throttling bot scanning/scraping traffic? If so, what strategies are you employing?
Kyle Breneman
Integrated Digital Services Librarian
University of Baltimore
I believe in freedom of thought and
freedom of speech. Do you?