IP Blocking an aggresive "robot"

Using up my bandwidth

[okephoto]

I just put an IP block on 196.3.51.241 as whatever it is it has viewed 50,000 pages in the past 4 days and used up 1.2 GB of bandwidth. Does anyone know what this is? Is there any problem putting a block on this IP?

Thanks

[jdMorgan]

Could be a problem, depending on your business. If they're not a customer, ban 'em!

Lookup: [ws.arin.net...]

Jim

[moltar]

Does look like a bot. Maybe it's some kind of offline downloader?

What is the user agent string?

Here is what ARIN gives on this guy:

OrgName: Syntex USA Inc. 
OrgID:  SYNTEX-1
Address: Corporate Information Systems 3401
Address: Hillview Avenue
City:  Palo Alto
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94304
Country: US
 
NetRange: 196.3.32.0 - 196.3.56.255 
CIDR:  196.3.32.0/20, 196.3.48.0/21, 196.3.56.0/24 
NetName: NETBLK-SYNTEX
NetHandle: NET-196-3-32-0-1
Parent:  NET-196-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Assignment
NameServer: AENEAS.SYNTEX.COM
NameServer: ATHENE.SYNTEX.COM
NameServer: HLRNS1.ROCHE.COM
Comment: 
RegDate: 1993-10-06
Updated: 2001-12-11
 
TechHandle: LP16-ARIN
TechName: Peters, Larry 
TechPhone: [phone]
TechEmail: [e-mail] 

[okephoto]

Thanks for the input. The site they are checking out is an online poster site. While my group of sites is fairly large their daily page views exceed what the combined total of all the sites is. I did ban them as this must be some automated page grab but why would anyone be doing this?

Anyways, from what I can tell they are not a customer or if they are they certainly don't spend much money.

I guess I'll see what happens.