Maintenance¶

The following describes tricks and tools useful for debugging and maintaining a production instance of Pontoon.

Mitigating DDoS attacks¶

In a DDoS attack, the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources. This stops everyone else from accessing the website as there is too much traffic flowing to it.

One way to mitigate DDoS attacks is to enable traffic throttling. Set the THROTTLE_ENABLED environment variable to True and configure other THROTTLE* variables to limit the number of requests per period from a single IP address.

A more involved but also more controlled approach is to identify the IP addresses of the attackers (see the handy IP detection script to help with that) and block them. Find the attacking IP addresses in the Log Management Add-On (Papertrail) and add them to the BLOCKED_IPS environment variable.