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I am getting a lot of hits to my web server from multiple IP addresses that are owned by Akamai. This stood out to me as the requests are for resources that are no longer available.

These resources should not be being requested - the pages that refer to them are marked as being non-cachable.

Any clues?

HopelessN00b
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Joel
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  • TIP: Try logging more information about these requests. Perhaps the request headers contain information useful in tracking down the cause of what you are experiencing. – Niels Basjes May 18 '10 at 19:58
  • Also check How Akamai works - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/ratul/akamai.html –  Sep 29 '11 at 14:43
  • Check the referrer header on your pages. Most likely there is a link on some other page pointing to your pages and Akamai is following that link when somebody request that page (this is a technology called prefresh) –  May 20 '10 at 06:33

2 Answers2

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This only happens if Akamai actually knows about your resources. So you simply tell them to wipe that information....

Other than that I see several possible reasons for what you see:

  1. Have your pages been indexed by a search machine?
  2. Perhaps someone has copied your page to a wiki/forum/...
  3. It is a known issue that some companies have local caching proxy servers that don't correctly follow the "non-cachable" flags.
  4. Has an Akamai engineer configured these URLs as part of a host monitoring solution?

You should also know that if this traffic is comming from Akamai that you should be aware of this: If a single browser fires a sequence of 100 requests towards a server (that is available via akamai) then these requests are likely to arrive at the webserver from different Akamai servers. In the past I've seen that a single TCP connection from Akamai to the webfarm is likely to contain the requests from a multitude of clients from all over the world.

HTH

Niels Basjes
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  • Thanks for your response. I'm not using any Akamai services, so I'm still not sure why I am getting requests from their IP addresses – Joel May 08 '10 at 15:56
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Is this possible a newly configured server or IP address? Perhaps an Akamai customer recently shrunk their resources and you ended up with a stale configured IP.

It is also possible that some Akamai customer's DNS is misconfigured and has your IP as a typo.

I would contact Akamai's abuse department.

If these are all 404s, you can try to netfilter them out, but Akamai have a lot of IPs I'd imagine and possibly not request from same all the time.

Justin Alan Ryan
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