We are still having issues ☹ Koha has been unreliable for the past 2 hours. 520 errors and Cloudflare handshake errors. Lori Ann Thorrat Manager Catalog / Processing Cuyahoga County Public Library Administrative Offices 2111 Snow Road / Parma Ohio 44134-2728 p 216.749.9373 / f 216.749.9445 cuyahogalibrary.org Pronouns: she/her/hers -----Original Message----- From: Koha <koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz> On Behalf Of Chris Davis Sent: Monday, June 23, 2025 1:52 PM To: Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Subject: [Possible Spam] Re: [Koha] Slowness & outages Importance: Low Thank you Everyone for sharing with us. Koha for us seems to now be running normally and I hope that stays the status quo. Best, Christopher Davis Technical Services Specialist Lincoln County Library District (541) 264-8141 <tel:5412648141> christopher.davis@lincolncolibrarydist.org www.lincolncolibrarydist.org <https://www.lincolncolibrarydist.org> Click to view my schedule or book an appointment w/ me <https://calendar.app.google/6Ymx4UrHiTfR6faaA> On 6/23/25 6:42 AM, Coehoorn, Joel wrote:
We have similar issue with misbehaving AI crawlers, especially trying to crawl the opac_search.pl <http://opac_search.pl> page, which should be restricted by robots.txt.
fail2ban was only a partial success or stopgap, and didn't really fix things.
What is working MUCH better is setting the apache MaxRequestWorkers option (or possibly MaxClients on some systems) in the apache.conf file. I haven't needed to manually intervene with our server for this issue since setting the option. We still have some outages, but they are significantly less frequent (maybe one or two every other week) and the server typically recovers on it's own by the time uptimerobot detects it and sends the notification to me. Further tuning of the value could probably eliminate the problem for us entirely. As is often the case, the best value here will depend on your specific server, database size, configuration, and load, but 15 can be a nice starting place.
*Joel Coehoorn* Director of Information Technology *York University* Office: 402-363-5603 | jcoehoorn@york.edu | york.edu <https://york.edu>
On Mon, Jun 23, 2025 at 1:49 AM Wagner, Alexander <alexander.wagner@desy.de> wrote:
Hi!
> My library consortium is hosted by ByWater Solutions and during the last > seven days, several times Koha has been slow and then there's an outage > for thirty to sixty minutes then things are fine for a while, then > there's more slowness and outage. ByWater is addressing these issues, > but I want to know if anyone else's sites or clients are having issues > like these?
I am no exprt on the issue but we see this a lot on our open access repositories. There we were able to get it under control for the time being using `fail2ban`. As robots.txt tends to get ignored especially by the AI (I am sure of the meaning of `A` but I doubt the common translation of `I`...) the setup on our end is quite customized to the URLs exposed by the repos. For the jail config we currently use
``` [apache-proxy] enabled = true filter = apache-proxy action = hostsdeny-proxy[name = apache-proxy] logpath = /opt/invenio/var/log/apache-ssl.log maxretry = 12 findtime = 5 bantime = 6000 ```
However, for this to work it's imperative that your proxy pass on the origin of the request (`X-Forwarded-For`).
> I am also trying to get educated on modern internet threats and causes > for issues like this.
It might be worthwhile to check up also with the repository community. With the exposed full texts they provide much more valuable content for the so called AI than just the bibliographic description. Additionally, in the past we saw quite aggressive bots harvesting the full texts for non-AI-related uses, so they nag us for quite some time. But unfortunately, there is no simple solution.
-- Kind regards,
Alexander Wagner
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY Library and Documentation
Building 01d Room OG1.444 Notkestr. 85 22607 Hamburg
phone: +49-40-8998-1758 e-mail: alexander.wagner@desy.de _______________________________________________
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