Tag: wordpress

varnish throttling

I came across the varnish throttle module the other day – which seems quite useful – and certainly gives better control over abusive requests than using fail2ban (in that, only specific URLs/request types can be targeted and blocked with the throttle module, while fail2ban tends to trigger the blocking of any traffic from a client… Continue reading varnish throttling

Cleaning up a lot of WordPress _transients

WordPress seems to like hiding a load of ‘transient’ (cacheable) stuff in it’s wp_options table. Unfortunately for one site, it seems it didn’t bother to clean up the transient stuff, leaving behind about 750,000 records… which made a WP version upgrade painful, as MySQL locks the wp_option table which causes all other page loads to… Continue reading Cleaning up a lot of WordPress _transients

Fail2ban filter for WordPress

With the annoying brute force wordpress hack going round, one way to protect your site(s) would be to use fail2ban, with a configuration something like (which I’ve shamelessly lifted from http://blog.somsip.com/2011/12/protecting-apache-webservers-from-wordpress-admin-login-dictionary-attacks/ ). The below seems to be working, and given it’s relative simplicity it’s obvious how you’d go about changing to protect other POST based scripts… Continue reading Fail2ban filter for WordPress