Large number of guest pings since day 1

[sixfold_distract]

Hello, I manage a private forum NodeBB on my Cloudron instance that requires a login to see anything at all. However, since the first day of the install, I have had a consistent number of "guest" page views (hovering around 350 per hour). It seems to very clearly be a bot, but none of the data appears to be visible when not logged in.

Is there a way to find the source of this traffic and potentially block it?

[subven]

First: Disable indexing via robots.txt at the Cloudron app menu --> security tab
Second: Ask upstream at the NodeBB forums plugin section

[msbt]

@sixfold_distract 350 per hour sounds like the healthcheck, which probably happens every 10 seconds. I've never used NodeBB, but usually you can ignore certain IPs (which would be an internal one in that case)

[girish]

@msbt beat me to it Healthcheck every 10 seconds for an hour is 360. Seems to match your findings.

You can also filter by user agent Mozilla (CloudronHealth)

[sixfold_distract]

Thanks to all for the info. Indeed the robots.txt has been set, and the health check does seem to be the culprit.

However I was not exactly sure how to go about setting up the block of the health check, and perhaps is it something that I should just ignore?

I also was unable to find a NodeBB doc or a Cloudron doc on filtering by user agent.

Or would the IP address be 172.18.0.1, which I found from this post?

Would there be any unintended consequences of filtering in either of those ways?

Any additional information on all of this would be greatly appreciated!

[jdaviescoates]

@sixfold_distract said in Large number of guest pings since day 1:

perhaps is it something that I should just ignore?

that'd be my guess

sounds like you probably want the healthcheck so Cloudron knows if the app is running

[subven]

@sixfold_distract if you suppress the healthcheck, Cloudron thinks the app is not responding which can have negative side effects. Nothing to worry about just leave it like it is