HTTP 444 (No Response) instead of 404, 403 error pages?

Question

I always use "return 444" in the nginx config to stop crawlers that access my servers directly via IP or via the wrong hostname. It just closes the connection. Perfect.

Now I want to use this response instead of the standard 404.html pages that nginx throws, but I fail at configuring.

error_page 500 502 503 504 /custom_50x.html;

This works fine, but I can't "return 444" like here:

server {
    listen      80;
    server_name "";
    return      444;
}

Does anybody know a way to combine these two?

An interesting approach, given problems with slowloris and similar drip-connection attacks. — Kzqai, Jul 20 '17 at 19:47

score 18 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 08 '22 at 21:48

18

Redirect request then you can return status code easily:

server {
  error_page 500 502 503 504 @blackhole;

  location @blackhole {
    return 444;
  }
}

edited Jun 08 '22 at 21:48

Community

1
1

answered Jan 02 '17 at 06:59

Shahzaib Ali Khan

687
6
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2

I have found the `=444` in the `error_page` directive to be unnecessary. – diachedelic Jun 16 '21 at 09:25
Thanks @diachedelic, unfortunately the edit is too small to do it. (min. 6 chars) – Howard Nov 24 '21 at 20:24
1

@Howard The indentation could be fixed at the same time. – diachedelic Nov 25 '21 at 00:19

Jean Monet · Answer 2 · 2020-01-09T15:16:24.623

Just wanted to add that using @blackhole named location raised Nginx's default 500 error page when certain weird requests were sent to the server (more details here), and thus the desired result (444) was not achieved.

I went around this by using the following notation instead:

error_page 301 400 403 404 500 502 503 504 =444 /444.html;
location = /444.html {
        return 444;
}

Update: note that if the above block is itself inside a location block, the location path location = /444.html {… may prompt an Nginx error upon reload because Nginx requires it be a sub-location of the parent location block --> such as: location = [sub-location]/444.html {….

HTTP 444 (No Response) instead of 404, 403 error pages?

2 Answers2

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