I have a, let's call it, "legacy" VHost configured on an nginx server. It used to be a full site, but it has since been decommissioned and all the content removed. The server
block now looks something like this:
server {
listen 80;
server_name defunct-site.com;
return 410;
}
There are DNS records and applications which are out of my control that still point to this server, and it still gets relatively significant traffic despite my pleads to the third party to update their configuration and stop trying to hit the site. Needless to say, I can't change my IP address without significant pointless effort.
Is there a stronger way to tell these clients that their traffic is no longer welcome here? The source IPs are all over the place, so doing a successful iptables block seems unlikely. And I need to read enough of the HTTP request to get to the Host:
header to make sure I'm not clobbering traffic intended for a legitimate VHost.
return 444
to close connection without answer. I doubt that you could do something more than that.