My server admin just told me that he disabled trackbacks at the server level because, even though I had them disabled at the blog level, there were so many trying to hit my mt-tb.cgi at the same time, it was hosing the server up. He deleted that file and things are groovy now.
What I wonder is, have others had this problem and are there other solutions. I don't use trackback very often, but I don't want to be completely unable to.
Full Version: Trackback Spam Clogging Up Server
I used a combination of my Spamlookup mods, my Simple Filters pluging, and my AutoBan plugin. I just got hit with roughly 1800 junk trackbacks over the last 36 hours, but every one was junked and all the IP addresses banned to reduce the server load.
My anti-junk defenses
My anti-junk defenses
QUOTE (buggy @ Mar 17 2006, 03:39 AM)
My server admin just told me that he disabled trackbacks at the server level because, even though I had them disabled at the blog level, there were so many trying to hit my mt-tb.cgi at the same time, it was hosing the server up. He deleted that file and things are groovy now.
What I wonder is, have others had this problem and are there other solutions. I don't use trackback very often, but I don't want to be completely unable to.
What I wonder is, have others had this problem and are there other solutions. I don't use trackback very often, but I don't want to be completely unable to.
I've actually had the same issue starting last week. I finally deleted the TB file - I didn't really care much about TB's anyway, so I really hope that clears things up.
im having the same problem,
with my comments too.
with my comments too.
QUOTE (O.com @ May 4 2006, 06:01 PM)
im having the same problem,
with my comments too.
with my comments too.
Yes, I'm having the same problem, with trackbacks and comments. The other day, I had to delete over 6000 junk trackbacks from my relatively obscure little place on the internet. I'm not sure renaming/removing the mt-tb.cgi file does anything. Instead of executing that file, the server has to serve up 404 files. Blog spam is now so widespread and so incessant that it has become a denial of service attack for most sites. I would love to hear anyone's solution to this plague short of disabling everything.
I just added the autoban suggested by Annoying Old Guy above. It appears to block the IP's at the server level. This is simple to install. Maybe ...
It says ...
It says ...
QUOTE
Overview
MTAutoBan is a plugin for Movable Type. It maintains an Apache webserver configuration file (also known as an “.htaccess” file) that bans IP addresses in the Apache webserver. The set of banned addresses is generated from the junk objects stored in the Movable Type database. Whenever the set of junked objects changes, the Apache configuration file is updated.
The goal of this plugin is to slow down the flood of junk objects by banning the IP source addresses that generate them. This makes it easier to check the junk objects for bad filtering and makes denial of service effects from excessive amount of junk much less likely. By doing the banning at the Apache webserver level instead of in Movable Type itself, the runtime cost of the banning is minimized. With a good set of filters, even large1 groups of systems are rapidly banned with little effect on the weblog.
Because of the large numbers of compromised computers used to generate junk, the maintenance cost of banning the associated IP addresses must be near zero. This plugin achieves that goal. No maintenance is required once installed, and the defaults are good enough that initial configuration is not even necessary.
To make the banning as automatic as possible, the configuration file is updated whenever
An object is marked as “junk”, either explicitly or via junk filtering.
A set of objects is marked as “not junk” explicitly.
Whenever a junked object is deleted.
MTAutoBan is a plugin for Movable Type. It maintains an Apache webserver configuration file (also known as an “.htaccess” file) that bans IP addresses in the Apache webserver. The set of banned addresses is generated from the junk objects stored in the Movable Type database. Whenever the set of junked objects changes, the Apache configuration file is updated.
The goal of this plugin is to slow down the flood of junk objects by banning the IP source addresses that generate them. This makes it easier to check the junk objects for bad filtering and makes denial of service effects from excessive amount of junk much less likely. By doing the banning at the Apache webserver level instead of in Movable Type itself, the runtime cost of the banning is minimized. With a good set of filters, even large1 groups of systems are rapidly banned with little effect on the weblog.
Because of the large numbers of compromised computers used to generate junk, the maintenance cost of banning the associated IP addresses must be near zero. This plugin achieves that goal. No maintenance is required once installed, and the defaults are good enough that initial configuration is not even necessary.
To make the banning as automatic as possible, the configuration file is updated whenever
An object is marked as “junk”, either explicitly or via junk filtering.
A set of objects is marked as “not junk” explicitly.
Whenever a junked object is deleted.
This is a "lo-fi" version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.