I noticed yesterday that my site was painfully slow, and my server was thrashing like nobody's business. My access logs suggest that my site has been crawled incessantly by online casinos and other various forms of lowlife, and that it's been happening for some time.

Hopefully that's over now.

I found that just bouncing Apache helped. The disk thrashing stopped, and when I waited a few seconds before restarting, the thrashing didn't start back up again. So whatever was hammering me gave up in the interim when the data stopped flowing.

But in the meantime I did some changes to my .htaccess file. The always helpful Dive into Mark gave me a good starting point.

I'm sure that I broke lots of legitimate use of my site in the process, but if that's the price I have to pay to keep evil people from abusing my computer and DSL line, then so be it. Since I pay the bills, I get to make the rules.