For the past couple of weeks, since the most to a Linode server, I've been tweaking tons of little settings in and around the system to keep things running smoothly.

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One of the most annoying issues is those botnets that don't seem to have any specific traits to capture. With requests coming from multiple IPs and trying to access all manner of different things, there doesn't appear to be a simple catch-all solution for these things.
But over the past few days I've managed to track down a couple of little quirks which I can only assume are there because of the way the botnet has been created.

One fairly commonality is the Chrome version number, which is about 1,000 or so versions out of date, but they're all showing up as the same figure.
As such, I've perma-banned (via .htaccess) any user with that exact Chrome version, under the assumption that most real-life users will have a more up to date version of Chrome. (It does typically auto-update, after all.)

I've also learned that if you set php.ini to allow a lengthy upload request time, then that takes over from the script execution time, meaning that if you have a nice stable fast site (like mine!) the execution time can be thrown by forcing an upload.
I'm going to have to look into ways to avoid that, today, most likely via the method of moving the upload script to its own little folder, with its own php.ini settings.

Aaah, the complicated world of server setups!
This was much easier when other people did it for me!!!