David R. Heffelfinger

  Ensode Technology, LLC

 

Preventing Trackback Spam in Apache Roller


This morning I woke up to find 150+ comments in one of my blog entries. I have email notification of comments set up in Roller, so the 150 emails notifying me of comments in my blog indicated that something was obviously not right.

I logged in to my blog to see what is going on, and sure enough, I had over 150 bogus trackbacks in one of my blog entries.

I googled around, and found a way to prevent trackback spam in Apache roller, going to "Main Menu", then clicking on "Server Administration", then checking "Enable verification of trackback links?" and "Enable referrer linkback extraction?" seems to have taken care of the problem.

Roller should really have those two settings checked by default.

Also, I noticed all the bogus trackbacks were coming from the same IP address (83.233.30.32). I googled around, and it looks like many others are having problems with spam from that IP address as well. Just to make extra sure, I dropped any incoming traffic from that IP by configuring IP Tables:

iptables -A INPUT -s 83.233.30.32 -j DROP

iptables-save > /etc/sysconfig/iptables

Hopefully the problem is taken care of for good.

 
 
 
 
 

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© David R. Heffelfinger