Developers guide

Chapter 9

Performance optimization 76

Host 'host_name' is blocked because of many connection errors. Unblock with

'mysqladmin flush-hosts'

This will grind PacketFence to a halt so you want to avoid that at all cost. One way to do so is to increase

the number of maximum connections (see above), to periodically flush hosts or to allow more connection

errors. See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/blocked-host.html for details.

Captive Portal Optimizations

Avoid captive portal overload due to non-browser

HTTP requests

By default we allow every query to be redirected and reach PacketFence for the captive portal operation.

In a lot of cases, this means that a lot of non-user initiated queries reach PacketFence and waste its

resources for nothing since they are not from browsers. (iTunes, Windows update, MSN Messenger, Google

Desktop, …).

So far, we blacklisted clients known to be misbehaving. However, a completely different approach can

be taken: whitelist only known browsers.

This has the nasty side-effect of being unfriendly with (blocking) less popular browsers and devices so

this is disabled by default.

If you want to enable this feature, edit conf/httpd.conf.d/block-unwanted.conf, and uncomment

the following lines:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^Mozilla

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^Opera

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^BlackBerry

RewriteRule ^.*$ - [L,forbidden]

This will allow the following browsers to reach the captive portal (but nothing else):

∏ BlackBerry

∏ Firefox

∏ Google Chrome

∏ Internet Explorer

∏ Opera

∏ Safari