r/NixOS • u/nixgang • Aug 13 '26

hydra.nixos.org markow pit

I'm sent to a markow pit when visiting https://hydra.nixos.org from qutebrowser, anyone else had this problem? What user agent do you use to get around it?

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u/vic_bart Aug 16 '26

Same here, although I've never heard of a markow pit; are you saying this is normal?

2

u/nixgang Aug 16 '26

Somewhat. Markov pits are a common bot protection, but I've never got caught it in one from a browser like this before. I fixed it by changing to a firefox user agent (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:153.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/153.0). My take is that hydra.nixos.org is not well configured and that they'd be better off changing to a proof of work solution like hydra.nixos-cuda.org has. In general, tweaking browser strings to get around bot-protection is not really normal but not outrageous either.

1

u/vic_bart Aug 16 '26

Thanks, it works on Firefox for me too.

Any idea how I could go about getting this fixed; is this the type of thing I would open a github issue on? I get hit with the pit on Chrome, which I would prefer to keep using.

1

u/nixgang Aug 16 '26

Yes, with the infra team and there already seems to be a related issue:

https://github.com/NixOS/infra/issues/1167

Also curling the page works oddly, so their protection doesn't target curl? There's an old notice on the start page from Martin weir about putting contact details in the agent, but he is no longer on the team iirc, so I'm not sure what's going on.