There’s been a lot of talk about the Google Web Accelerator (GWA) over the past week. Lots of people talking about how to stop the accelerator from even connecting to your site.
If you’re running the Apache webserver (with mod_rewrite enabled) you can simply put a few lines of code in your .htaccess file to deny connections coming from the Google proxy.
According to this post on phantonNews the proxy uses the 72.14.192.0 – 72.14.192.255 address space, however, I found that while using the GWA that I had connections coming from the 64.233.173.x address space.
64.233.173.66 - - [04/May/2005:22:25:30 -0400] "GET /mt HTTP/1.1" 301 64.233.173.66 - - [04/May/2005:22:44:00 -0400] "GET /mt HTTP/1.1" 301 64.233.173.66 - - [04/May/2005:23:06:52 -0400] "GET /mt HTTP/1.1" 301 64.233.173.66 - - [04/May/2005:23:06:53 -0400] "GET /mt HTTP/1.1" 301 64.233.173.66 - - [05/May/2005:10:08:46 -0400] "GET /mt HTTP/1.1" 301
I merely added the 64.233.173. address to the list of blocked IP’s and viola, no more GWA on my site. Here’s the code (originally from fantomNews):
RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^(72.14.192.|72.14.194.|64.233.173.)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/gwa-forbidden.html$
RewriteRule ^.*$ /gwa-forbidden.html
Right now the GWA is not blocked from accessing this site, I’m rather curious to learn what it will do over time, so I’m closely watching the server logs to see.
If you’re using the GWA, please visit this page to test my ruleset. I have a strong feeling that the proxy works like the Google searches itself, different datacenter/proxy per geographical location…would make sense, balancing the workload amongst datacenters.
Incidently, Google is no longer offering the GWA download on their site:
Thank you for your interest in Google Web Accelerator. We have currently reached our maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users we can support.
..although it’s still available other places:
