Firewall blocks Googlebot, Jetpack & Photon

[villa]

Since I activated the WAF Firewall last Friday the Cloudflare Firewall now blocks the Googlebot, Jetpack and Photon. I couldn’t find any rules or the reason why those get blocked. Under “Match Triggered” it just says “Filter: 843e02a4eea…”

I thought Cloudflare knows the IPs of Googlebot and has them whitelisted? How come they still get blocked and how do I solve this?

[domjh]

Hi @villa,

If a firewall event is triggered by the WAF, it will show with which rule was triggered and the description of the match triggered, I would’t expect it to show what you have described above.

@villa

Filter: 843e02a4eea…

That would mean to me that it is a Firewall Rule that you have created that is causing the issue, which do just show Match Triggered: Filter … as you described.

I would suggest you take a look at what Firewall Rules you have created in the dashboard and see if they could be causing the issue.

For example, if you currently have

that could be causing the issue, you could add the line

Which will use

@villa

Cloudflare knows the IPs of Googlebot

and then not block the requests if they are from a known crawler etc.

Link:
How does Firewall Rules handle traffic from known bots?

[villa]

Thanks for the detailed reply. Originally I thought that it could be the Cloudflare Managed Special rules as described in this thread but if you say the filter points to a Firewall Rule created by me it confuses me even more as I only blocked countries like Russia, Ukraine and so on by using “country equals Russian Federation -> block”.

I didn’t block US traffic and I can’t think of any other rules that could lead to this outcome, so as said, I’m really confused. Is their any way to match the “Filter: 843e02a4eea…” to a specific rule? I would like to see which rule this filter is triggered by. Right now I saw in the list that even a User Agent Cloudflare-Diagnostics was blocked by “Filter: 081ffbb8ef…”

[domjh]

@villa

see which rule this filter is triggered by

This is unfortunately not too easy.

I have thrown together this quick tutorial on how to do it, following a discussion with Cloudflare Support.

Viewing the Rule ID of a Firewall Rule

With the update to the firewall events log, the log now shows the rule name of the triggered rule which makes it easier to track down. If you still need to see the rule ID of a specific rule, you can follow this tutorial. The rule ID of a Firewall Rule cannot be viewed on the normal dashboard pages. You have to go to the Developer Tools in your browser to see the ID. This tutorial starts from the point where you have developer tools open in your browser. If you are not sure how to do this, pl…

[villa]

Dear @domjh,
thanks again for your help! I followed your great instructions Viewing the Rule ID of a Firewall Rule and checked which rule triggered the filter and the issue is, that the rule/ID is not listed there…
I don’t know if it’s a bug or what causes this. I have created a new rule which allows all known bots and this shows together with the non-existant rule.

Another, separate, issue is that the “jetmon/1.0 (Jetpack Site Uptime Monitor by WordPress.com)” seems not to be included in the Known Bots list!?

[domjh]

@villa

not listed there

Without access to your account here on the community, I would suggest you get in the queue with support as I expect they will be able to figure it out quickly!

I will also have another look when back on desktop (on mobile ATM).

To contact Cloudflare Customer Support, login & go to https://dash.cloudflare.com/?account=support and select get more help. Please give Support the complete details and link to your Community post. Here’s a bit of background on Cloudflare Support for reference:

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172476-How-do-I-report-a-bug-to-Cloudflare-