James Wilson /blog

They showed me about updating Wordpress.

It seems it keeps deciding to add spam to my latest post which causes it to not be shown anymore, for some reason. And it only started right after I updated it from my highly out of date version, which was working fine.

Sure, it had SQL injections, XSS vulnerabilities, and content disclosure problems, but it worked fine. Now this version not only is lacking all those cool things listed in the beginning, well for at least a day or so, but kinda forgets about the whole working part. Hooray!

Now, I’m not sure if it’s a problem with my server, but haven’t had this problem with any of my other Wordpress installations or the old version, and my other versions are only 1 version out of date. I also have no problem with any of the older posts, just the one after the 2.3.2. upgrade.

I guess I learned a lesson about updating Wordpress. Don’t. Just don’t.

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After a 35 minute downtime of upgrading Wordpress, which seriously guys, upgrading is a pain in the ass, we’re back. And by we, I mean me.

Anyways, went from 2.1.3 to 2.3.2. It had been a while. Why? Because as I said, upgrading is a horrible experience.

Here’s my .bash_history for the upgrade session.

Oddly exactly 100 lines.

You might notice I made the directory ja.meswilson.com. That’s becuase I bought the domain meswilson.com, mainly so I could have the domain j(with one of those at signs that look like a’s here)meswilson.com, because that’s awesome.

I haven’t decided if I’ll switch this to that domain (I do kinda like nothingoutoftheordinary.com), so I guess we’ll see. If I do switch, most people probably won’t notice except it might take an extra few hundred milliseconds for the redirect.

And dear Wordpress, make upgrading easier. You advertise a really quick install, it’s just the upgrading that kills ya. If you don’t do it, or someone hasn’t already, I’m going have to, and I don’t feel like doing anything.

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Yahoo decided it needed to promote some of it services by making a WordPress plugin that allows you to add Yahoo based info to your post. It “reviews” your post as you write it to see what useful extra information it can add. Like, give a location, and you can add a Yahoo map to your post.

Like the example adds a map to the University of Texas when you mention it, since people might happen to know where Austin is but not where UT is. Here’s a hint, go to Austin, and bam, there’s UT.

Buit alright, you can get useful Flickr photos for your post. Let’s see what it recommends for this post. O wait, it doesn’t work with the Wordpress version, crap. I did install it on another blog that has an updated version of Wordpress.

You might be wondering why I have a really outdated version of Wordpress. It’s because it’s hard to update Wordpress. Here’s how I update everything on my computer, apt-get update. For Wordpress, you need to copy everything a couple of times, wget latest.tgz, change the user and pass it uses for MySQL (it usually doesn’t have create or delete privileges), and then have to make sure everything works, which something of course broke during that.

Anyways, copying this over to my other blog and looking at the rcommendations, it allows me to “Search the Web” for University of Texas, Flickr photos, and Wordpress, and the Flickr photos recommendations are all UT based and have nothing other than the UT related to it. Trying to load more photos though, doesn’t work. It’ll load maybe a couple photos then just do nothing.

Sorry Yahoo, but this just isn’t that useful. It might have looked good on paper, but it just has such a limited use. The Flickr photo addition could be useful, but in this case, it definitely wasn’t.

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Link 1 VPS from vpslink.com. $7.95 a month.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 4400 (2.0 GHz) (not sure what percentage I get)
Memory: 64 MB RAM (no swap, should’ve gotten Xen)
OS: Ubuntu 7.10
Server: lighttpd w/ PHP via fastcgi
DB: MySQL 5
Hard Drive Space: 2.5 G (1.4G - 57% used)
Avg load avg: 0.01, 0.00, 0.00
Avg MemFree: 16768 kB
Current access.log lengths: 45081 (lighttpd) + 7589 (apache2 - not in use anymore) = 52670 lines
Current bandwidth used: ~ 500 MB (50 MB / day)
Max down speed: 5.37 MB/s (4.86 MB/s avg for full file)
No FTP server

They say the Link 1 & 2 are good only for hosting static files, but PHP and MySQL seem to be working pretty well… with lighttpd. With apache2, not so much. It would run out of memory occasionally, and unlike with lighty, the only way to lower it was to restart the server, though I was able to get it working, which a lot of people apparently couldn’t do.

If you want any other information, just comment. Also, if you want to me to post my lighttpd.conf, my.cnf, or apache2.conf, I can. I might write up a how-to in the future, maybe in the vpslink wiki. If someone actually wants it, I actually try to make sure I do do it.

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Here’s a screenshot of the account page on Netfirms:

Which one do you think will allow you to turn auto-renew off?

Product Renewal? Nope. I can renew it early if I feel so obliged.

Billing Profile? Think again. I can change my credit card, it must be valid, to be able to still renew my account.

User Profile? Haha, no. I can change where I live though.

Upgrade account? Hey, maybe there’s a way to downgrade. But no. I can upgrade to my current account plan, somehow.

None of the other things have anything to do with renewing, so let’s try the support section.

“turn off auto renew”? Nope. How to do I renew my domain or Plan?

“cancel”? How do I transfer my hosting from my existing Provider to Netfirms?

Damn. I guess I’m going to have to contact them. Oh yeah, they have a horrible form. Oh yeah, they have to make sure you checked the FAQ. Yes, inquiry sent.

Hmm. Since it’s almost 2 AM here, and tomorrow is Thanksgiving (though I don’t know if there’s some sort of Canadian Thanksgiving, but no matter, I’m sure they’ll take off tomorrow), and they don’t like working of Fridays or weekends, I guess I might hear from them on Monday, which is 2 days before it automatically renews it again. Uggh.

Update: Damn. Got my email much earlier than expected.

We are sorry to hear that you have decided not to continue hosting with Netfirms.
We would like to inform you that we process all cancellations by phone. Simply call our toll free number 1- 866 - 973 - 4664 Monday-Friday between 9:00 am and 9:00 pm Eastern Time, so that we may assist you.

Yeah, that’s right. You have to call them. A place that completely relies on web-based service requires you to call them to cancel. What the hell? Guess I’ll call them tomorrow (want to download a complete backup before it’s canceled) and hopefully it’ll be over (no wait, I also have to cancel my other one in a month or so), though I’m not sure if they’ll give me my 14 days I still have left on it.

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Since I moved my most trafficked sites to this server, I’ve decided to post stats about my last server.

These were all generated from awstats starting in June 2007.

Summary:
Visits: 44232
Pages: 259259
Hits: 664952
Bandwidth: 10.27 GB

Day of Week:

Bots:

File Types

File type			Hits	Percent	Bandwidth	Percent
	gif	Image	171157	25.7 %	286.27 MB	2.7 %
	php	Dynamic PHP Script file	161938	24.3 %	2.65 GB	25.7 %
	png	Image	123239	18.5 %	940.24 MB	8.9 %
	html	HTML or XML static page	71254	10.7 %	1.35 GB	13.1 %
	jpg	Image	41547	6.2 %	1.81 GB	17.6 %
	css	Cascading Style Sheet file	36671	5.5 %	209.12 MB	1.9 %
	js	JavaScript file	32797	4.9 %	975.10 MB	9.2 %
	pl	Dynamic Perl Script file	17603	2.6 %	3.37 MB	0 %
	zip	Archive	3065	0.4 %	671.79 MB	6.3 %
	Unknown		2996	0.4 %	73.20 MB	0.6 %
	xml	HTML or XML static page	693	0.1 %	11.13 MB	0.1 %
	gz	Archive	455	0 %	38.98 MB	0.3 %
	pdf	Adobe Acrobat file	432	0 %	345.18 MB	3.2 %
	txt	Text file	303	0 %	27.62 MB	0.2 %
	swf	Macromedia Flash Animation	281	0 %	8.06 MB	0 %
	mp3	Audio file	205	0 %	11.31 MB	0.1 %
	htm	HTML or XML static page	146	0 %	898.08 KB	0 %
	src		47	0 %	209.57 KB	0 %
	htc		44	0 %	75.37 KB	0 %
	exe	Binary runtime	15	0 %	12.73 MB	0.1 %
	tar	Archive	14	0 %	140.00 KB	0 %
	rss		14	0 %	16.77 KB	0 %
	rar	Archive	12	0 %	776.26 MB	7.3 %
	iso		7	0 %	12.14 MB	0.1 %
	tgz	Archive	4	0 %	155.69 MB	1.4 %
	java		3	0 %	6.54 KB	0 %
	200707		2	0 %	1.06 MB	0 %
	php5		2	0 %	116.60 KB	0 %
	com		2	0 %	6.85 KB	0 %
	200706		1	0 %	11.11 MB	0.1 %
	org		1	0 %	6.85 KB	0 %
	xpi		1	0 %	19.93 KB	0 %
	bmp	Image	1	0 %	812.58 KB	0 %

Operating Systems:

	Operating Systems	Hits	Percent
	Windows	484878	72.9 %
	Macintosh	66143	9.9 %
	Unknown	63796	9.5 %
	Linux	47928	7.2 %
	BSD	524	0 %
	Sun Solaris	366	0 %
	Unknown Unix system	331	0 %
	Sony PlayStation Portable	219	0 %
	BeOS	196	0 %
	RISC OS	165	0 %
	Others	406	0 %

The full breakdown is actually kinda interesting. I’m not going to post the table, just the top few.

Windows XP 386962 58.1 %
Mac OS X 65371 9.8 %
Unknown 63796 9.5 % (Note: these are mainly bots that aren’t know or labeled as bots, like montastic, which does about 4-5 requests every 15-60 minutes)
Windows Vista (Longhorn) 52904 7.9 %
Linux 47928 7.2 % (All ditros)
GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution) 26244 3.9 %
Windows 2000 21199 3.1 %
Ubuntu 17156 2.5 %
Windows 2003 10032 1.5 %

The rest are under 1%.

Couple interesting parts. XP clearly is the leader. Mac OS X is beating Vista. Linux isn’t that far off from Vista.

Browsers:

	Browsers	Grabber	Hits	Percent
	Firefox	No	279462	42 %
	MS Internet Explorer	No	250935	37.7 %
	Unknown	?	54960	8.2 %
	Safari	No	25913	3.8 %
	Opera	No	15350	2.3 %
	Netscape	No	13341	2 %
	Mozilla	No	11977	1.8 %
	Konqueror	No	3104	0.4 %
	Camino	No	2356	0.3 %
	K-Meleon	No	1587	0.2 %
	Others		5967	0.8 %

Yay, Firefox is the leader, though that could partially be since this site doesn’t always render correctly in IE.

Anyways, that’s it. You might find them interesting, you might not.

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I should be doing really soon now, like tonight, though it might take till tomorrow or so, so I might be going away for a bit, and hopefully for just a bit, possibly more though, because I’m not sure what this is going to entail. I know what I’m doing, just not what I’m doing with these people.

Update: Got it working, kinda. mod_rewrite seems to not be working, though it was earlier. And since this is running on a very low memory system, there might be some memory errors, which I’m working on lowering the memory usage of everything.

Quick Update: 15 minutes after last update, I got mod_rewrite working. Yay! I’m hoping WP-Cache will keep memory usage low. I’ll keep checking on it periodically to make sure it’s still good.

Started at 8:30 PM yesterday (domain transfer occurred at 9:00 PM. Server bought at 9:30 PM). It’s currently 7:52 PM. Little under 24 hours to get it working. Not great. It would’ve only been a couple if I had realized I can’t override the default host’s actions by a new VirtualHost, or something like that.

Update 3: I’m going to try to switch this to lighttpd instead of apache probably later tonight. I’m also going to see if I can switch to Xen virtualization instead of OpenVZ.

Update 4: Going to try to switch over to lighty. So expect things being weird or not working probably for the next couple of hours.

Update 5: Got lighty working. Still will be doing some modifications. It seems to run out of memory actually quicker than apache was, which I’m finding kinda odd.

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For the past couple of days, with today being the worse, the database server has just been completely horrible. Not sure why, but I keep getting “MySQL Server has gone away” errors. Lots of them. So pages might only load partly or not at all. And It’s really starting to annoy me.

I dispatched a support ticket to netfirms support hours ago and haven’t received a response. No surprise there.

I added the line @mail("[my_email]",
"WordPress Database Error",
"Error:$str\r\n
Query:$query\r\n
IP:".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."\r\n
Page:".$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']."\r\n"); in the error section of wp-db.php, and within 4 hours of adding that, I’ve gotten over 40 emails. Uggh. And they don’t stop coming.

So I think it’s time to switch to at least a VPS. I’m thinking with either GoDaddy or 1and1, unless there’s something I should know or there are better options.

But this leads me to something I don’t really want to do, but it’s much better than the alternative of ads, or think will work. If you found this site useful or just want to help out, feel free to make a donation. Just click the PayPal icon below.

You can donate whatever amount you want, just know that PayPal takes a certain amount for their blood money.

If you add your site to comments, I’ll most likely subscribe to it if it’s full content.

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