Unknown bot - amzn_assoc

anyone sen it?

[upside]

I've been getting a tremendous ammount of hits from a bot with a useragent of "amzn_assoc". Its shown up at the following ip's this past week:

66.125.173.224
64.160.49.82
64.166.159.198
64.166.156.221
64.165.204.84
64.166.157.42

Does anyone know who/what this is? Any reason not to ban it? A search on google turned up nothing.

I know Amazon webservices uses a bot named "aranhabot" but does this one belong to Amazon?

P.S. - Thanks to all on Webmasterworld for all the good reading. I've been lurking for quite a long time!

[chiyo]

/is the site an amazon affiliate? We get these but assumed it was amazon checking that their affiliates were following their TOS e.g. if you are using their web services you must update the search results regularly.

[Romeo]

... the IP addresses are adsl subscriber lines of snfc21.pacbell.net ... I don't think it is the real Amazon.

Regards,
R.

[WebGuerrilla]

I've seen it quite a bit also. Definitely one for the ban list.

[carfac]

upside:

Got hit by this last week.... sorry, I should have posted it. Hit pretty hard, got itself banned on my sites.

dave

[Key_Master]

This is what an Amazon employee looks like...

IP: 207.171.180.101
Host: 207-171-180-101.amazon.com

[upside]

Amazon posted this [forums.prospero.com] on their Associates Announcement Board.

So Amazon does have a bot named amzn_assoc. I wonder though why it's comming from pacbell.net.

Last week I banned it using .htaccess because it downloaded over 350 megs of dynamically generated content without once checking robots.txt.

There is more information and discussion about this in this thread [forums.prosperotechnologies.com] on their Associates Board.

[spinnercee]

If it's any help, I get incoming from Alexa.com who is an associate/partner of Amazon.com --- Check 2 see if you're listed... who knows? I haven't noticed the bot, though.

[spinnercee]

I should mention that Alexa is a search engine that caches a cute little image (looks like a screen capture) of webpages -- Does anybody know how they do that? :)

[jdMorgan]

If any of you are Amazon Associates, it would be a service to all if you would report to them that this 'bot is being banned because it does not check or respect robots.txt.

I have few hard-and-fast, non-negotiable rules, but this is one: Respect robots.txt or eat 403s.

Jim

P.S. Spinnercee: Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

[carfac]

Respect robots.txt or eat 403s

:) :) :)

Jim, you kill me!

dave

[wilderness]

<snip>Jim, you kill me!>

Acually. . .a new internet acronym may be in order?

"403ONK" :-)

[jdMorgan]

dave,

Yeah, but who talked me into hacking that bad-bot-blocking script? :)

wilderness,

Maybe this is a dumb question, but "ONK"? Whadizzat?

Jim

[upside]

I received a call from the VP of webservices at Alexa. They have temporarily stopped their bot while they investigate the matter. I'm supplying them with relevant sections from my logs. Their bot tries to access a particular site no more than 2 times per second. However, I have some sites that are all sharing 1 IP address. Apparently their checks are based on domain rather than ip.

It's really refreshing to see both Amazon and Alexa respond like this.

BTW, don't I get a "Welcome to WWW", too?!

[jdMorgan]

upside,

Where are my manners?!? ... :o

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!

Let us know how this turns out. If they fix it, I'll unblock them.

Thanks,
Jim

[Key_Master]

I wont.

[wilderness]

<snip>Maybe this is a dumb question, but "ONK"? Whadizzat?>

A bad joke I thought would be easy to understand. :-(
Try a search on PLONK :-)

[jdMorgan]

Ah, OK - Thanks for clarifying - I am not up-to-speed on these usenet terms.

Yes, this UA is a real plonker and it did indeed make a nice *plonk* sound when it hit the bottom of my kill file. Which, BTW, was created by the bad-bot banning script [webmasterworld.com] originally written and posted here on WebmasterWorld by Key_Master, for which I am very grateful. I was encouraged - even goaded - into installing said script by member carfac, for which I am also very grateful. I can't believe I used to try to keep up with this manually!

Thanks,
Jim

[carfac]

Key_Master's script is great, and he deserves a lot of thanks for posting it here, and making it available. As with Jim, I do not beleive I survived without it! So credit where it is due- to Key_Master!

dave

BTW, I made some minor changes to Key_Master's script- I added a time stamp (so you can empty out the ones over a week old easily) and a bypass for wap users. I would be happy to send any changes to anyone who wants.

[upside]

carfac. I'd like to see your script :) Please stickymail me.

[Edge]

Sticky me as well if you don't mind carfac.

Thanks

[Josk]

This is now a slashdot topic...

[carfac]

Hi:

I had a few requests, and the script is not a secret, so I decided to post here. Apologies to Key_Master for hacking his script! Comments welcome- thats why we are in this forum, right? Lets make it all better!

OK, here is the script. See instructions AFTER the script!

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
# Name this script trap.pl, upload it in ASCII mode to your cgi-bin and set the file permissions to CHMOD 755.
# Original script by Key_Master taken from [webmasterworld.com...]

# This is the only variable that needs to be modified. Replace it with the absolute path to your root directory.
$rootdir = "/path/to/root/directory";

# Grab the IP of the bad bot
$visitor_ip = $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'};

if ($visitor_ip =~ /^216\.239\.3([3¦7¦9]\.5)$¦^216\.239\.35\.4$/) {
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "<html>\n";
print "<head>\n";
print "<title>Forward On</title>\n<META NAME=\"robots\" CONTENT=\"NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW\">\n";
print "</head>\n";
print "<body>\n";
print "<p><b>We had an error.<BR>Please return to continue!</b></p>\n";
print "</body>\n";
print "</html>\n";
exit;
}
else {

$visitor_ip =~ s/\./\\\./gi;

# Set Date
$date = scalar localtime ( time );

# Open .htaccess file
open(HTACCESS,"".$rootdir."/bad_ip.txt") ¦¦ die $!;
@htaccess = <HTACCESS>;
close(HTACCESS);

# Write banned IP to .htaccess file
open(HTACCESS,">".$rootdir."/bad_ip.txt") ¦¦ die $!;
print HTACCESS "\^".$visitor_ip."\$\n\# $date\n";
foreach $deny_ip (@htaccess) {
print HTACCESS $deny_ip;
}
close(HTACCESS);

# Close
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "<html>\n";
print "<head>\n";
print "<title>Error</title>\n<META NAME=\"robots\" CONTENT=\"NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW\">\n";
print "</head>\n";
print "<body>\n";
print "<p><b>A fatal error has occured:</b></p>\n";
print "<p><b>Invalid Site HTML method...</b></p>\n";
print "<p><b>Please enable debugging in setup for more details.</b></p>\n";
print "<A HREF=\"http://www.imdb.com/harvest_me/\"> </A>\n";
print "</body>\n";
print "</html>\n";
exit;

}

########################## END OF SCRIPT

OK, so take and pop this little puppie into the same directory you want protected, chmod 755. I use a file I call "bad_ip.txt" to hold my bad IP's, but you can change to anything (including .htaccess, but make sure you escape the "."!) This will write to the TOP of any file you have set up, so, the older stuff goes down two linbes every time this gets written to.

If you edit bad_ip.txt (or .htaccess) make SURE to upload to your server ASCII, or it wiull not work.

I think that is it... comments welcome!

dave

[EliteWeb]

:) slashdot cought the news too (:

[andye]

You might be intersted in Randal Schwartz's 'Throttle' script as well:

[stonehenge.com...]

Prevents any one IP address from submitting requests too quickly.

Andy.