[SciPy-dev] Server problems: resetting with cronjob?

[Michael Abshoff]

Gael Varoquaux wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 01:11:52PM -0600, Peter Wang wrote:
>> Lately the server has been experiencing abnormally high load, and we  
>> are devoting resources now to transitioning services from it to the  
>> new hardware at conference.scipy.org.  Today I will start working on  
>> moving the mailman mailing lists over, and then I will coordinate with  
>> admins of individual subdomains to move the websites, trac, and svn  
>> repositories to the new hardware.
> 
> I am just wondering if this will change anything. I'd like to know where
> these high loads are coming from. I am afraid the same probems will come
> up with the new server.
> 
> A maybe unrelated fact: the spammers are really devastating the moin
> instance. I don't know what to do about this. Cleaning it up takes ages,
> especially with how reactive it is. :(.

Hi,

two tips of fighting spammers from the Sage project's wiki:

  * add a list of common Chinese words to LocalBadContent, i.e.

http://wiki.sagemath.org/LocalBadContent

Also make sure to clean out all the spammer attempts on the hard disk. 
I.e I deleted 6,000 directories in "pages" of the Cython wiki since Spam 
attempts are preserved and not actually deleted from disk. If you have a 
couple ten thousand of those in one directory this might make every wiki 
access painfully slow and impact the whole server.

  * upgrade to the latest moin moin release and activate the question 
captcha. Spam has dropped to zero in the last 3 months since we used it.

> Gaël

Cheers,

Michael


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