A summary of the MixnodeCache Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the MixnodeCache robot? Is it a good or a bad robot? And why is it visiting your website?
Shown below is a sample log file entry for the MixnodeCache web robot. It’s derived from an Apache web server log file. From the log entry information about how the robot identifies itself, HTTP User Agent, and where it is hosted are given.
Server Log File
vntweb.co.uk 3.84.228.228 - - [01/May/2019:04:45:19 +0100] "GET /ads.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 312 "-" "MixnodeCache/1.8(+https://cache.mixnode.com/)"
HTTP User Agent
MixnodeCache/1.8
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 3.84.228.228.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 3.0.0.0 – 3.127.255.255 |
| OrgName: | Amazon Data Services NoVa |
| Address: | 13200 Woodland Park Road |
| City: | Herndon |
| StateProv: | VA |
| PostalCode: | 20171 |
| Country: | US |
| Updated: | 2018-04-25 |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Amazon’s NOVA Cloud computing specialisation.
Owner
Mixnode
Country
Canada
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website https://cache.mixnode.com.
The referenced website confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The Mixnode website provides details about how their robot complies with the robots.txt exclusion standard, which was described at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt, but is not currently available. Information is available on the same website https://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html and also on the w3c website at https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4.1.1.
Details are given about both preventing the robot from indexing the website and how to adjust its crawl rate.
Their advice is to include the following entry in the robots.txt file to prevent MixnodeCache from visiting your site
User-agent: MixnodeCache
Disallow: /
No mention is made regards controlling the frequency of MixnodeCache visiting your. However, you may wish to try setting a minimum acceptable delay between consecutive requests with the following added to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: MixnodeCache
Crawl-Delay: 10
In this example the delay has been set to 10 seconds.
As is common with website crawlers there is a delay between changes made to the robots.txt file and the change being implemented.
Take care making changes to the robots.txt file. A misunderstanding in configuration or an error in configuration can lead to important search engines excluding your website.
Further Info
Mixnode aims to turn the web into a database. It offers a scalable platform to extract and analyse data from the web.
