What is ext9.vc.search.re w.r.t. Yahoo?

being clobbered by ext9.vc.search.re: what is Yahoo doing?

[arnarn]

Today we started getting clobbered on https access from ext9.vc.search.re. I could not get an IP from the dns, so I used netstat and came up with 68.142.231.49 which appears to be something from Yahoo!

We do get crawled regularly from something like crw54.vc.search.re4.yahoo.com, but the ext9.vc.search.re is a mystery. There was one log entry today from ext9.vc.search.re2.yahoo.com which looked at robots.txt (no referrer info: GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 271 "-" "-")

NO log entries showed up under this name (e.g. for GET / POST, etc), but our web site came to a screeching halt because of all the connections.

If the offending IP is re-enabled, the same things happens: we get buried under https connections.

Anybody have suggestions for next-steps?