Over the last few days, this server has come under attack from spammer scum trying to leave fake trackbacks that point to their nasty little web sites in order to increase their Google ranking. It doesn’t work of course. No trackback gets posted to this blog until I’ve approved it. But they don’t care about that. They just fire off trackbacks to as many sites as they can without bothering to check whether they’re actually getting any benefit.
What it does acheive, however, is to bring this server to its knees. When it’s attempting to process dozens of trackback requests there’s precious little processing power left in this server to do useful stuff like serving blog pages to you or handling my email.
After struggling with this for almost a week I’ve decided that the simplest course of action is to just disable the program that handles trackbacks. Trackback is an interesting and useful feature to have on the server, but it all gets a bit pointless if it’s preventing the server from doing any real work.
Currently I’ve turned it off with extreme prejudice. If you’re writing something that will trigger a trackback on this site then you’ll almost certainly just see an internal error message page. Sorry about that, I’ll get round to cleaning it up later on.