Why is MSNBot ignoring robots.txt?

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Tuesday, August 5. 2008

Why is MSNBot ignoring robots.txt?

Today, the root file system on our public svn server nearly ran out of disk space. The reason? The /tmp directory was quickly filling up with temporary files created by websvn, which I set up parallel to the FishEye repository browser for testing purposes. A quick investigation of the apache log files revealed the culprit - a crawler from Microsoft was running haywire and decided to ignore the rules in the robots.txt file, even though it did actually looked at the file before!

Here is how robots.txt looked like (I now changed it to disallow everything):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /fisheye/
Disallow: /websvn/

If I am not mistaken, no crawler should actually consider going into the SVN browser directories. Some snippets from the apache log:

$ grep robots.txt /var/log/apache2/access_log | grep msn
65.55.208.178 - - [03/Aug/2008:16:58:35 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 53 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.212.64 - - [03/Aug/2008:19:05:55 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 53 "-" "msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.235.139 - - [03/Aug/2008:22:14:47 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 53 "-" "msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.25.136 - - [04/Aug/2008:00:31:32 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 53 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.212.64 - - [04/Aug/2008:00:57:38 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 53 "-" "msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.235.139 - - [04/Aug/2008:06:49:33 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 53 "-" "msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.212.64 - - [04/Aug/2008:07:16:21 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 53 "-" "msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.25.136 - - [04/Aug/2008:09:29:17 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 53 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.104.156 - - [04/Aug/2008:11:08:24 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 53 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.208.164 - - [04/Aug/2008:11:29:34 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 53 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.212.64 - - [05/Aug/2008:13:30:20 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 53 "-" "msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.208.178 - - [05/Aug/2008:16:17:59 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 53 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

Good boy, it checks the robots.txt file. But what is this?

$ grep msnbot /var/log/apache2/access_log | tail -20
65.55.208.164 - - [05/Aug/2008:22:48:15 +0200] "GET /websvn/filedetails.php?repname=MySQL+Documentation&path=%2Fworkbench%2Fall-entities.ent&rev=9981&sc=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 6408 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.208.164 - - [05/Aug/2008:22:48:15 +0200] "GET /websvn/dl.php?repname=MySQL+Connector%2FJ&path=%2Fbranches%2Fbranch_5_0%2Fconnector-j%2F&rev=6600&isdir=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 40960 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.208.164 - - [05/Aug/2008:22:48:19 +0200] "GET /websvn/rss.php?repname=MySQL+Documentation&path=%2Fproto-doc%2F&rev=9994&sc=1&isdir=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 36907 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.208.164 - - [05/Aug/2008:22:48:21 +0200] "GET /websvn/rss.php?repname=MySQL+Documentation&path=%2Ffalcon%2F&rev=8323&sc=0&isdir=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 15278 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.208.164 - - [05/Aug/2008:22:48:21 +0200] "GET /websvn/rss.php?repname=MySQL+Proxy&path=%2Ftrunk%2FDoxyfile&rev=365&sc=1&isdir=0 HTTP/1.1" 200 4162 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.208.164 - - [05/Aug/2008:22:48:21 +0200] "GET /websvn/rss.php?repname=Eventum&path=%2Feventum%2Freports%2F&rev=3542&sc=1&isdir=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 90591 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.208.164 - - [05/Aug/2008:22:48:23 +0200] "GET /websvn/log.php?repname=MySQL+Documentation&path=%2Fndbapi%2F&rev=9749&sc=0&isdir=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 21440 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
65.55.208.164 - - [05/Aug/2008:22:48:23 +0200] "GET /websvn/log.php?repname=MySQL+Documentation&path=%2Ffalcon%2F&rev=8511&sc=0&isdir=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 18541 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

As you can see, it is happily crawling everything below /websvn/, which also includes links named "Tarball" - guess what they are good for? Yes, they create tarballs of a given SVN directory, using /tmp to build up the archive file... Within a very short amount of time, it used up more than 6 GB of disk space, as it seems as if websvn leaves these temporary directories behind, if the connection gets aborted or times out. We do have a cron job that wipes /tmp from files older than a certain amount of days, but it currently fills up much faster than what the cron job usually discards. I need to investigate if it is actually is a bug in websvn to leave these temporary dirs behind.

Hello Microsoft? Can you please fix your bots so they not only read but honor robots.txt files and stop DOSing our site? Thanks :-)

Posted by Lenz Grimmer in MySQL, OSS at 23:08 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)
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Lenz, I think the right address to complain is not <strong>your</strong> blog but the Livesearch blog http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch MSNBot could parse the content of your blog, but it is still missing some AI to automatically create a bug report and assign reponsible people at MS to it <img src="/templates/default/img/emoticons/wink.png" alt=";-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" />
#1 Vladislav Vaintroub on 2008-08-06 00:45 (Reply)
MS and .TXT: does it work with CRLF line terminators? At least that's what you have to use in Microsoft compatible TXT-files elsewhere... (NB: and in .BAT files if you don't like commands randomly skipped). Which MIME type does your web server use? Did it actually exclude /fisheye/ ? PS: Is it possible to not have all of my comment in one paragraph?
#2 strcmp on 2008-08-06 02:24 (Reply)
Whilst I totally agree, Microsoft should follow the robots.txt standard. But you know what - it's not really a standard as much as we would like to think it is. If you recall a year or so ago, Google lost a major court case because of robots.txt. Ive blogged about it if you have a chance to read it. http://blog.sherifmansour.com/?p=16
#3 Sherif (Homepage) on 2008-08-06 02:40 (Reply)
The MSN service was again rebranded, this time as a more traditional Internet access service. With the MSN 2.5 release in late 1997, some exclusive content was still offered through the MSN Program Viewer, but the service mainly directed members to "normal" web sites. With the MSN Internet Access 2.6 release in 1998, the MSN Program Viewer was abandoned entirely in favor of the more familiar Internet Explorer interface. Hope this helps, Andy Colleman
#4 AoC Gold (Homepage) on 2008-08-27 19:31 (Reply)

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