What on earth is this?

massive spidering effort

[John_Caius]

My server is at this moment getting hit to the tune of 20x normal daily traffic in the last sixty minutes.

The user agent appears to be [Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1]. I won't post the IP address here but reverse DNS lookup points to something called RIPE.net. I've seen that referred to previously in this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

and would appreciate it if someone could tell me what this is and what I should do about it. Is it traffic I should block or is it worthwhile?

[kevinpate]

Not enough info to say John.
Saying an IP number correlates through RIPE.net is an extremely broad statement.

A couple honking big chunks of dirt are covered via RIPE, Europe and Australia just to name two.

you can take the ip number and run it through the whois for RIPE
ht*p://www.ripe.net/db/whois/whois.html

[tombola]

ripe.net is the European version of arin.net.
Normally, you can do a reverse DNS lookup for .com domains on arin.net, while you must use the services of ripe.net for European (country) domains (.be, .de, .fr etc.)

Just go to www.ripe.net/db/whois/whois.html and enter the IP in the search box.

[John_Caius]

Solved the problem - we caused it ourselves. Never a great idea to set up recursive loops in the way your server handles URLs. "Redirect to the homepage, then redirect to the homepage, then redirect to the homepage....."

Oops!

[grandpa]

Could have become interesting had you blocked.