Removing Trac ticket comment spam in Debian Lenny

The Vuurmuur website runs Trac and overall I’m pretty happy with it. The only thing that Trac doesn’t do well, is dealing with spammers. Spammers target Trac a lot, so that’s a real problem.

To prevent spammers from making it through, I run Scallywhack and a number of custom ModSecurity rules. So far, spams only made it through as new tickets in the ticket tracker, so I installed the TicketDeletePlugin.

Yesterday, I saw the first spam as a comment to an existing and valid ticket. Like tickets themselves, ticket comments can not be removed by Trac by default. Luckily, upstream Trac seems to have fixed this. I’m running Debian’s version of Trac 0.11.1 however, so I decided to patch that. The patches in the Trac ticket #454 didn’t apply cleanly, so I had to patch it manually. To save others the work, it’s available here: http://www.inliniac.net/files/trac_0.11.1-debian-comment_edit.patch

To use it, make a copy of your /usr/share/pyshared/trac directory.
Next, go into the trac directory and run the command:
patch -p1 < /path/to/trac_0.11.1-debian-comment_edit.patch

After this, each comment in the comment system will have a “edit” button and you can remove the spam message content. It’s not possible to remove the entire comment, but this works for me.

Vuurmuur developments

Last weeks I’ve spend many hours on my Vuurmuur Firewall project. First I’ve been improving the code to prepare for a new release. I’ve added NFQUEUE support to Vuurmuur, so I could use it with nfnetlink enabled Snort_inline. Also the connection killing has been improved. The rules limit options were extended, to allow more flexibility.

Second, with the great help of Adi Kriegisch, I’ve been working on setting up a new build server for Debian and Ubuntu packages. Credits mostly go to Adi, who did most of the work and hosts the server. So many thanks to Adi! The new build server supports all version of Debian from Sarge up and of Ubuntu from Dapper and up.

Third, I have been busy setting up a new site for Vuurmuur. It is based on the Trac software and replaces both the static site at sourceforge.net and the tikiwiki based wiki. The new site can be found at http://www.vuurmuur.org/

Last but not least, and the reason for this post, is that today I’ve released a new version of Vuurmuur. The version, 0.5.73, is the first non-test release since January. This has taken a lot longer than I wanted, but work and other projects and of course ‘real life’ have taken much of the time from Vuurmuur. I don’t think this will change any time soon, unless someone will join the project to contribute some serious amount of coding time, or someone wants to fund me to do so.

On the roadmap (which is a nice feature of Trac btw) one can see the future directions of Vuurmuur. Ideas and comments are welcome. So are bug reports of course 🙂