Recent “Tech Support” articles have shown a variety of “LAMP” optimization tips, from tweaking PHP, to installing a PHP opcode cache, to ensuring MySQL is firing on all cylinders. If your Web site traffic merits these efforts, you can glean real benefits — but remember that premature optimizations is the root of all evil.
Now that you have a tuned, well-trafficked site, what should you think about next? High on your list should be security. Hopefully, you’ve adopted the best practices for locking down your Apache and PHP installations, but beyond that, there are many Apache modules that can further bolster a hardened configuration and therefore increase uptime. One module that comes to mind is mod_security, an embeddable Web application firewall. Another is mod_evasive.
Available from http://www.zdziarski.com/projects/mod_evasive/ and licensed under the GNU Public License, mod_evasive is an Apache module that provides evasive action in the event of an HTTP denial of service (DoS), distributed denial of service (DDoS), or brute force attack. mod_evasive is also designed to be a detection and network management tool, and can be easily configured to talk to ipchains, firewalls, and routers. Moreover, it can report abuses via email and syslog.
To detect potential problems, mod_evasive creates an internal dynamic hash table of IP Addresses and URIs and denies any single IP address if it requests the same page more than X times per Y seconds, makes more than N concurrent requests per X seconds, or makes any requests while temporarily blacklisted….
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