As i’m sure many others of you do – I have an .htaccess file defined in the wp-admin directory where i white list access based on source IP address space. I haven’t had any problems with it in the past and the IPv4 subnets i manage the site from don’t really change.
Recently I had someone helping me with my site for a week or so and he was using IPv6 to access the site and so i had to whitelist his IP space – no big deal. What i find now that I’m using IPv6 is that the address space my provider uses changes all the time so the access list is a moving target.
I’m wondering if anyone has a better way of managing access restrictions using IPv6 with .htaccess. The only things i can come up with are:
* Allow an ever increasing subnet size until i don’t block access (and thereby have too broad of an allow policy. (Currently allowing /64 slices)
* Check my source address each time i want to access wp-admin and update .htaccess accordingly: this is a pita
* Remove .htaccess when i want to use wp-admin and restore it when i’m done. I put together a short script to do this and it’s what i’m doing now but it’s not a great solution.
* Is .htaccess still the best way to do this? I have 2-factor on my login but i’d like to block access at a lower level to cut out the crawlers that sap site resources (which used to happen all the time before i put htaccess restrictions in originally