Netquery Version 4.15

See it in action HERE. Download it HERE. Discuss it HERE.

Version 4 of Netquery, the complete PHP/SQL open-source toolkit of network utilities, introduces access monitoring, logging options and spambot screening based on Michael Hampton's "Bad Behavior" utility. Its purpose is to deal with problems caused by automated scripts that attempt to read everything on your site, harvest email addresses, and post spam and false referrers, trying to advertise their own links through your web pages. It works to prevent spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to known profiles.

The current release (v4.15) uses no deprecated PHP functions (PHP v5.3 compatible) and updates Netquery's access monitoring and spambot screener functions based on version 2.0.28 of Bad Behavior. In addition, Netquery's access monitoring functionality is now combined with all others within a single loadable CMS block. Thus, the full range of access monitoring options is independent of block display choices and is now available wherever ANY of Netquery's CMS block types has been loaded and activated. The administrative interface has been revised to reflect the fully independent choices for operational and display options.

Based on user requests, this release also provides a choice of either user sessions or page hits as the basis for geoIP "top countries" counts and pseudo-flag images have been added for all IANA reserved address blocks. Site administrators may, of course, substitute their own suitably sized images for any of those provided. Netquery's monitor log management interface can be used to run SQL queries on blocked spambot entries, to perform Whois lookups on selected IP addresses, and to delete any or all of the listed entries.

Netquery's major features currently include the following:

• access monitoring & log management,
• spambot "bad behavior" screening,
• geoIP & top countries usage mapping,
• multidomain & IP/AS whois lookups,
• autodiscovery for whois TLD server,
• DNS and Dig (ANY, SOA, NS, MX) queries,
• email address format & MX validation,
• port check with services lookup option,
• HTTP HEAD and GET requests,
• ICMP pings (local and/or remote),
• traceroutes (local and/or remote),
• looking glass router interrogation,
• updateable geoIP & ports data paks,
• user inputs with admin notice & approval,
• multi-instance sideblocks in CMS editions,
• admin selectable CSS stylesheet options,
• full W3C XHTML 1.1 & CSS compliance.

The administrator can enable or disable each Netquery feature individually and can configure local execution and/or a remote server script for the ping and traceroute features. The administrator can also edit all of the data tables used by the whois, port services and looking glass features and can allow site users to submit port services and exploits information for acceptance. Optional GeoIP and ports data tables can be downloaded and installed independently of the module core.

All current Netquery editions are fully compliant with W3C XHTML 1.1 standards. (Validation at that level is contingent on CMS versioning and other external environment factors.) The GeoIP feature, also included in the complete package download, is based on MaxMind's free countries release adapted and optimized for Netquery's SQL database operations. Netquery now requires PHP version 4.1 or later and it is fully compatible with PHP 5.x defaults.

If you are upgrading from an earlier version, please see the upgrade.txt document for important procedural sequence notes to avoid process error messages within CMS environments. For additional details, please see the Netquery Manual or go to the VIRtech Forums for discussion and answers to your questions.