[TkTech]

I used to just start giving any IP downloading way too much a redirect to multi-tb NASA images. This was a long time ago but it was surprisingly how many would follow redirects and never time out. Wouldn't see a request again for hours and then its right back to downloading a new part of the sky.

Those images also used to crash all the early GUI irc and chat clients that showed inline images without size checks...

[mcosta]

How do you know it followed the redirect and downloaded the image?

[timbit42]

Because it didn't come back for hours.

[dotancohen]

How were you tracking each IP address's data usage? Did you parse the logs every request? Store usage in a database? At the application or webserver level?

[TkTech]

Webalayzer! I'm not sure there were really any other options at the time other than writing your own. Parsed the apache logs and gave you pretty detailed results and you could see the usage (in kb, which tells you how long ago this was!) broken down by date and IP.

Once you added a redirect rule for the IP to apache you'd just check your log and see the IP that was hitting you every couple of minutes poofed for a good few hours.

[dotancohen]

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.

That's nuts. I suppose you had Webalayzer on a minutely cron job. It might have been drawing more resources than Apache itself!