ANVIL(8) ANVIL(8)
NAME
anvil - Postfix client count and rate management
SYNOPSIS
anvil [generic Postfix daemon options]
DESCRIPTION
The Postfix anvil server maintains short-term statistics
to defend against clients that hammer a server with either
too many parallel connections or with too many successive
connection attempts within a configurable time interval.
This server is designed to run under control by the Post-
fix master server.
PROTOCOL
When a remote client connects, a connection count (or
rate) limited server should send the following request to
the anvil server:
request=connect
ident=string
This registers a new connection for the (service, client)
combination specified with ident. The anvil server answers
with the number of simultaneous connections and the number
of connections per unit time for that (service, client)
combination:
status=0
count=number
rate=number
The rate is computed as the number of connections that
were registered in the current "time unit" interval. It
is left up to the server to decide if the remote client
exceeds the connection count (or rate) limit.
When a remote client disconnects, a connection count (or
rate) limited server should send the following request to
the anvil server:
request=disconnect
ident=string
This registers a disconnect event for the (service,
client) combination specified with ident. The anvil server
replies with:
status=0
SECURITY
The anvil server does not talk to the network or to local
users, and can run chrooted at fixed low privilege.
The anvil server maintains an in-memory table with infor-
mation about recent clients of a connection count (or
rate) limited service. Although state is kept only tem-
porarily, this may require a lot of memory on systems that
handle connections from many remote clients. To reduce
memory usage, reduce the time unit over which state is
kept.
DIAGNOSTICS
Problems and transactions are logged to syslogd(8).
Upon exit, and every client_connection_status_update_time
seconds, the server logs the maximal count and rate values
measured, together with (service, client) information and
the time of day associated with those events.
BUGS
Systems behind network address translating routers or
proxies appear to have the same client address and can run
into connection count and/or rate limits falsely.
In this preliminary implementation, a count (or rate) lim-
ited server can have only one remote client at a time. If
a server reports multiple simultaneous clients, all but
the last reported client are ignored.
CONFIGURATION PARAMETERS
The following main.cf parameters are especially relevant
to this program. Use the postfix reload command after a
configuration change.
client_rate_time_unit
The unit of time over which connection rates are
calculated.
client_connection_status_update_time
Time interval for logging the maximal connection
count and connection rate information.
SEE ALSO
smtpd(8) Postfix SMTP server
LICENSE
The Secure Mailer license must be distributed with this
software.
AUTHOR(S)
Wietse Venema
IBM T.J. Watson Research
P.O. Box 704
Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA
ANVIL(8)