Category: this weblog

disable trackback for older posts to get rid of spam

this weblog

‘trackback’ is a neat concept: You put a link in a blog post and the blogging software (wordpress in my case) will try to notify that link that there is some comment / info about it on this page.

Of course it only get’s abused by spammers. I turned active trackbacks off, so that posts get submited quicker.
Then I turned trackback as a target off in the workpress preferences under “Options” “Comments”.
This will change the default for new posts not to allow ‘pings’ which in this case seem to be synonym for trackback.

However older posts are still pingable / trackable etc. Instead of clicking 581 times on some check box I changed the
status of those past posts via mysql:


update wp_posts set ping_status = 'closed' ;

will do the trick.

moved the server

BlogsNow internet this weblog

Just moved the server to it’s new location. Things should be better now. More bandwidth and better reliability.
That would be the the theory. The next days we will see how that really will pan out.

Andreas

comment spam

this weblog

got lots spams attempts on my comments.
trying a simple turing test right now.

WordPress: what’s there not to like

this weblog

I am running a slightly modified Kubrick theme here. Looks ok, one day I get rid of the rounded corners.

One thing that bothered me (and some other people) was that links were not working in Archives or categorized entry display.

The fix was as easy as surprising:

Just remove the handling of archive’s and wordpress will default to the normal display. I feel that is nicer any way: Having one constient style for you blog. Not sure what I overlook. In case you like to have links working in category view just do the equivalent of:


cd wp-content/themes/default
mv archive.php not.archive.php

Looks like it works.

test post

this weblog

This would be a test post via the word press dash widget.

press F12. Blog. Return to work.

Nice.

server crash

BlogsNow linux this weblog

It all went to well.

suddenly the server was not reacting. Everything worked till the shell needed to do /anything/ with the disk.
Had to reset it. Sigh.

The syslog said:

May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: kswapd0: page allocation failure. order:5, mode:0x50
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<0214b29a>] __alloc_pages+0x28b/0x298
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<0214b2bf>] __get_free_pages+0x18/0x24
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<0214e9c1>] kmem_getpages+0x15/0x94
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<0214f74c>] cache_grow+0x155/0x29a
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<0214fa9e>] cache_alloc_refill+0x20d/0x23d
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<0215004f>] __kmalloc+0x6b/0x7d
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<82964f54>] kmem_alloc+0x50/0x96 [xfs]
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<829479a1>] xfs_inode_item_format+0xe0/0x239 [xfs]
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<8295aaf3>] xfs_trans_fill_vecs+0x3a/0x86 [xfs]
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<8295a8a4>] xfs_trans_commit+0x18d/0x300 [xfs]
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<829494de>] xfs_iomap_write_allocate+0x248/0x436 [xfs]
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<82949520>] xfs_iomap_write_allocate+0x28a/0x436 [xfs]
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<0224e474>] generic_make_request+0x190/0x1a0
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<829485a3>] xfs_iomap+0x23b/0x3ed [xfs]
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<829486ba>] xfs_iomap+0x352/0x3ed [xfs]
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<8296c99f>] xfs_bmap+0x1a/0x1e [xfs]
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<82965219>] xfs_map_blocks+0x29/0x11e [xfs]
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<82965dd9>] xfs_page_state_convert+0x273/0x4e8 [xfs]
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<829664cb>] linvfs_writepage+0x91/0xc6 [xfs]
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<021522db>] pageout+0x83/0xc0
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<02152522>] shrink_list+0x20a/0x547
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<02151540>] __pagevec_release+0x15/0x1d
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<02152a92>] shrink_cache+0x233/0x4d5
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<0215357f>] shrink_zone+0x8f/0x9a
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<021538a5>] balance_pgdat+0x176/0x249
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<02153a3e>] kswapd+0xc6/0xc8
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<02120fcf>] autoremove_wake_function+0x0/0x2d
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<02120fcf>] autoremove_wake_function+0x0/0x2d
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<02153978>] kswapd+0x0/0xc8
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: [<021041d9>] kernel_thread_helper+0x5/0xb
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: deadlock in kmem_alloc (mode:0x50)
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker kernel: possible deadlock in kmem_alloc (mode:0x50)
May 29 19:14:25 andreaswacker last message repeated 85 times

Don’t hope that this is common for Fedora Core3 on a AMD machine with a big array. I start to load the machine with tasks now.
Let’s see if it happens again.
Sure enough Mysql was not happy since I run it with delay-key-write.

WordPress said:


WordPress database error: [Incorrect key file for table 'wp_comments'; try to repair it]

So I did a


mysqlcheck -pXXXXXX --auto-repair wordpress

which seems to have done the trick.

website move

this weblog

So many sites, so many servers. But all but one (blogsnow) sites are now on the new server. Network Solution did a pretty good job in updating the DNS. For the ones where they hosted the DNS already they got the new IP out in less than the promised two hours. The ones that had a non-netsol SOA took a little bit longer, but by now (24 hours into the move) they also seem to be 90% done.

Remaining tasks:

move of blogsnow
qmail installation (still looks very complicated)

new server / new blog software

this weblog

On this server I will use wordpress for my weblog.
A slightly changed ‘Kubrick’ design.
I will not convert my old weblog.