I’ve just noticed that GET requests for Robert Sayre’s blog were failing with ‘412 Precondition Failed’. It turns out that this is due to some User-Agent checks by his website’s hosting company, TextDrive, as part of their abuse prevention. (Search for: TextDrive 412.) This really is the sort of thing that slowly breaks the web, but it is their decision. Either way, I’d quite like to read that blog:
...
use NetAddr::IP;
use URI;
...
# From whois NEXTLVL-046-TEXTDRV-1 | grep ^CIDR
my $textdriveNetblock = new NetAddr::IP('207.7.108.0/24');
...
# Special case for TextDrive
my $u = new URI($location);
if ($u->host) {
my $hostaddr = new NetAddr::IP($u->host);
if ($hostaddr && $textdriveNetblock->contains($hostaddr)) {
$req->header('User-Agent', 'Bad-Abuse-Prevention-Sucks/0.0');
}
}
It makes me feel like a criminal (worse – a spammer!), but it works.
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