Support

Admin Tools

#39084 Several sites keep getting taken down by the admin tools firewall

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
4.3.2
PHP version
8.0.28
Admin Tools version
4.3.3 Pro

Latest post by nicholas on Tuesday, 13 June 2023 00:37 CDT

Monday, 12 June 2023 12:34 CDT

robinclapp

Please look at the bottom of this page (under Support Policy Summary) for our support policy summary, containing important information regarding our working hours and our support policy. Thank you!

 

Hi, I have an ongoing issue with several of my sites.  They are going offline several times a day for 10-30 minutes at a time.  When I look at the site when they are down, its an admin tools error 403. I believe what is happening is an IP address is being blocked temporarily, but I don't understand how that one IP address is making the site unavailable to me (the site designer) and my client (the business owner). 

Many times I have had to remove an IP from the IP disable list in order to get the site back up, it was down for a full day.

Please let me know what to do to understand what is happening and how to setup admintools so that it is protecting my site but not taking it down everyday.

 

Robin

Tuesday, 13 June 2023 00:37 CDT

nicholas

Your site's server is behind a load balancer, a non-transparent proxy server (e.g. Varnish), a CDN (e.g. CloudFlare), or a third party service (e.g. Sucuri) therefore all requests to your site appear to be coming from the set of IP addresses as far as your web server is concerned. Your web server feeds this information to PHP which feeds it to Joomla which feeds it to Admin Tools. Therefore Admin Tools only ever sees the same (or one of the same set of) IP address regardless of who is visiting the site. As a result, when someone is getting blocked, everyone is getting blocked.

As of Joomla 3.9 this is something you can, and must, address at the Global Configuration of your site.

System, Global Configuration, Server, Behind Load Balancer, set to Yes.

You might remember the “Use IP Workarounds” feature in previous versions of Admin Tools which did the same thing. As a matter of fact, Joomla is using that very code I had written for Admin Tools' "Use IP Workarounds" feature. 

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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