[gopher] Throttling gopher daemon is desirable

[Jeff W]

dave at 661.org wrote:
> I figure there hasn't been much call for throttling functionality for
> gopher daemons.  Today it would have been much appreciated.  Could I
> convince someone to add a throttle to pygopherd?  I lack the savvy with
> Python to do it myself.  And now, here's why I bring this up.
>
> Over a three day period spanning June 16, 17, and 18 of 2013 (UTC),
> someone attempted and probably suceeded in downloading the entirety of the
> Interactive Fiction Archive from gopher.feedle.net.  This caused a massive
> spike in outbound network traffic that has probably cost some money.  I'm
> not sure yet how much.  We have the logs and are looking into tracking
> down who did it.  I'll probably post snippets of the logs later.

I think you could do this outside of whatever gopherd you're using via
one of the packet filter flavors.  I had the same thing happening several
years ago and rolled a not-to-complicated bourne script that watched for
people "vaccuming" and throttled them. Think it was calling 'pf' (it was/is
included in NetBSD's base install).

WRT your recent experience, was it by chance someone at *.rr.com ?  I've
seen quite a bit of traffic from that domain recently.

Jeff