Posted on

16-Aug-2009

WordPress and PHP
Still struggling to get a proper display of the Bootcamp 2007 blog using WP 2.8.2, two (!) new releases of WP has come out since I installed 2.8.2 – both security-related. Not that is would solve my problem, but I stilol think it wise to install the latest version – will be the second half of tjis week since I have other obligations on Monday and Tuesday…That will be version 2.8.4 – or perhaps an even newer one, when I’m ready to get to work on it…) though I very much doubt it is the solution to the problems.

PHP is another matter. Not a week after I issued a complained why it took so long to get at least the sources available on-line (to build a MySQL-5 engine), the patch was released – inclusing the sourcekit. (Purely by coincidence, no doubt, but it’s always nice to have at least some influence 🙂 )
I didn’t have time to play with it yest, except for installing it on a Personal Alpha and find indeed a new version (2.10 hould read as 2.1.0 ?) and being linked against MySQL 4.1 (which Mark Daniel seems to have left out). But now the sources are available, nothing stops me of rebuilding the engine.

Were it not that someone else (Mark Berryman) located another exclusion – not even documented as being excluded!: The SPL extension that is required for PHPMyAdmin (perhaps for a newer version that I have installed (2.8) but nevertheless, a miss, and filter extensions to prevent cross-site scripting. He has been able to rebuild PHP.EXE and PHPSHR.EXE, including MySQL 5.1. So I downloaded the kit and will test it to see what works – and what doesn’t. His set has PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) built-in so I need to disdable it in PHP.INI.
Something to test – as well. Perhaps it will solve the WordPress issue as well.

New tracks
I did have some time to upload some new Trips, Tracks and Travels content: Our last walk of the Pieterpad, and a variant of the Hanzepad. I also added the tracks of our trip to Italy this year.
So I’m getting back on track 🙂

Posted on

02-Aug-2009

Another attempt to upgrade
I cannot stand that upgrade to WordPress 2.8.2. causes so much trouble with the BC2007 blog. So the short time I had available tonight was used to create a logfile using the WATCH facility to find out what is going on. This time, I used Mozilla straight on the VMS box, and that tells me:

Redirection limit for this URL exceeded. Unable to load the requested page.This may be caused by cookies being blocked

The log shows that index.php is reloaded time after time, and finally the server gives in. It may be that I’ll need to do some debug on the PHP code as well. but that requires a logical to be set – and at this moment, there is no time to do that.
So for the time being, the Bootcamp 2007 blog is inaccessable – need to adapt the report definition…

Posted on

01-Aug-2009

Monthly maintanance
It seems the amount of spam has lowered – about 20% of the messages have been delivered, and just a few were false negatives and should be blocked. I’ve got information from Process how to achieve blockage of messages where sender = receipient. Add the ability to check the sending system’s address against my mailserver’s – but combining the two is still on the wish list…

PMAS statistics for July
Total messages    : 4724 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   : 3051 =  64.5 o/o (Files: 32)
Relay attempts    :   77 =   1.6 o/o (Files: 32)
Processed by PMAS : 1596 =  33.7 o/o (Files: 32)
        Discarded :  243 =  15.2 o/o (processed),   5.1 o/o (all)
     Quarantained :  363 =  22.7 o/o (processed),   7.6 o/o (all)
        Delivered :  990 =  62.0 o/o (processed),  20.9 o/o (all)

Of course logfiles have been archived, I’ve seem nothing particular, but I’l \l check the webserver logs next week and save the logs after that – Next Monday the logs will be cycled; rather short after the weekend.
Change login password
Last Friday my usual password on the VMS system expired, and that prevented access to webmail (that is, obviously, linked to the username). And I don’t have a facility yet to chnage my password over the Internet. It’ll be a problem anyway to chnage the password once it expires, since my current cobfurfatin requires the password to be valid – and an expired password won’t allow you to access the secured web…
Update WordPress to 2.8.2
This has been requested for some time now, and I tried it with the Bootcamp 2007-blog. But for some reason, the code seems to enter a loop somewhere and won’t load properly. It’s unlikely it’s a theme issue, since that one is really basic. The logical used (bc2007) is properly defined so that is not the problem either. Debugging PHP code is a tedious jobm, so I revert to 2.6.3. At least: for access; upgrade did succeed at some point, but display of the main page hangs when referring to 2.8.2…
Leasving this as they are: 2.6.3, untill the last update of PHP has been installed….