Blocking Bad Bots Causes Redirect Loop on Apache

  • Resolved jayharland

    (@jayharland)


    5 years ago

    After enabling HackRepair.com blacklist and adding the bot “MJ12bot”, I started seeing the following error several times a day:

    AH00124: Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use 'LimitInternalRecursion' to increase the limit if necessary. Use 'LogLevel debug' to get a backtrace.

    By comparing the error log with the access log, I was able to determine it was the blocked bot causing these errors.

    After spending much time, I finally came across a thread where it was explained that the following line (right before # End HackRepair.com Blacklist):

    RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

    Redirects everything to forbidden, even the 403.html error page it’s redirected to! This results in an infinite loop.

    To resolve this, I replaced that line with this:

    RewriteRule !^error - [F,L]

    Telling it to redirect everything except my error directory.

    This was a headache for me. Hopefully this helps someone else!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter jayharland

    (@jayharland)

    To follow up, iThemes overwrote my modification of course, which I didn’t consider. What I ended up doing was copying HackRepair.com’s blacklist, disabling it in iThemes and manually adding it to my .htaccess with the modification.

    beardedginger

    (@beardedginger)

    Hi,

    For clarification, did disabling the HackRepair.com’s Blacklist and adding the info to the .htaccess file resolve your issue?

    Thanks,

    Matt

    Thread Starter jayharland

    (@jayharland)

    Yes, once I disabled the blacklist and added the info to the .htaccess file manually, it was no longer being overwritten. Thank you.

    Thread Starter jayharland

    (@jayharland)

    Marking as resolved.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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