Shibboleth Maven repositories offline for the moment

[Scott Cantor]

Since this morning (April 14th) we've been under an onslaught of improper Maven traffic to our server (i.e. abusers proxying all their Maven lookups through our system, so constant requests for non-existent artifacts we don't host) and it took down our system entirely this evening.

For the time being I have blocked all external access to that virtual host in the hopes of keeping the more important portions of our site operating, namely the downloads, version files, and so forth.

I don't know that it will hold, but for the night at least the block will stay in place while we see what happens.

I don't know what our next steps will be at this point and we're simply not resourced to deal with this quickly, we've managed to be under the radar for most of our history and our luck ran out. If we can figure out a network-based mitigation we will, but that's beyond my personal capability right now.

Putting artifacts in Maven Central remains a non-starter for us for the foreseeable future, so please don't bother suggesting it, we would have if we could have.

-- Scott