Mostly about my amusement
Looks like I’m not the only one with the problem loading the visual editor. The fix (I’m using the built in editor right now) works and per the article is located here.
Click on the “Original Format” link go to the wordpress/wp-includes/js/tinymce directory and just
patch -p0 <3144-gzipoptoins-tinymce.patch
and poof the visual editor just works.
So far so good. On the upgrade from 2.0.7 the TinyMCE visual editor does not work while on my test blog it does work. I don’t use the visual editor so no big deal for me.
After installing and trying out many plugins and themes the options table in my wordpress database is a mess. I may just export everything and re-import into a clean database just to clean out the cruft.
Sunday I went to Stefan’s to upgrade my main server. It was running Fedora Core 1 and was well past an upgrade.
I wanted to get away from Fedora because it was not supported in a way that I liked. But I did not want to waste too much time so I took with me the latest Fedora and tried to upgrade.
The new Fedora did not like my hard disk setup and refused to see the existing system. So I figured I’d put on Opensuse 10.1, move files on the file system and do an install over the old Fedora Core 1.
Everything that could go wrong did. Massively. Non-stop. The DVD drives did not work. The boot sector was not installing. It installed but refused to boot.
I finally moved the mail and web pages over to another server (more that 3 GB of data) and did a clean install of Opensuse. I’m still recovering. Last night I finally got postfix with TLS and SMTP AUTH working. The web pages are working (sorta).
A while back WordPress.com released a plugin which protected your login with SSL. Normally when you administer a WordPress blog, it’s done via http. The plugin was originally released for the WordPress 2.1-alpha release. After a few updates it stopped working.
Over at Haris.tv this gentleman fixed the plugin and released a patch version of it which works with 2.0.6 as well as 2.1 (I have not tried 2.1 yet). It works like a charm (been playing with it all day). If you use a wordpress blog, have SSL set up on your web server, then it’s a must have and you should install it ASAP.
I run this blog on a VPS from Tektonics. It’s usually more available to the Internet than the server in the basement.
The only concern is that it’s not my server and backups are important. I had been using Tamba2’s script for backing up on a cron job but forgot that the script only got tables that you told it to. Donncha’s script gets all the tables, but I like getting one file for the data. Also I want to be able to retrieve the file backup without using a password onto the system but make sure that the file can’t be used by other people. For me that means putting it on the web server but encrypting the backup so that only my private key can decrypt the data.
The idea is to
The GPG file encryption is over the top; I’m practicing for solving a problem at work where scripts and passwords are a huge no-no.
Version 1.1.6 of the Flash BIOS is out and can be downloaded here. This version supports 64 bit operating systems.
The prior 1.1.3 release would not boot up an x64 Ubuntu live disk. Nice to have a 64 bit Core 2 Duo (what a lousy marketing name) and not be able to play with a 64 bit operating system. After I applied the update I loaded up my Ubuntu 6.06 x64 CD and booted into the live desktop. Cool, previously it would hang on just after unpacking the kernel.
This is probably done to support 64 bit Vista, but now I have the possibility of running a 64 bit Linux on my box just for fun.
I frequent the WordPress support page to a) see if I can help someone and b) see if anything new is going on that might interest me.
Viper’s Video Quicktags is beyond interesting. It makes it ridiculously easy to add video to your post as so:
[ youtube width=”425″ height=”350″]wMwoexR1evo[ /youtube]
and
[ googlevideo width=”425″ height=”350″]4437565772125007816[ /googlevideo]
A space was added right after each [ so the plugin would ignore it. Without the spaces, this cheerfully produces
and
All into the posting. You can use the WYSIWYG editor that WordPress provides since Viper007Bond supplies you with easy buttons to produce a dialog box for inserting the codes.
This particular posting was made using BlogJet and not the built in editor. I used YouTube and Google Video but the plugin supports many more.
It’s well written, simple to use and works. Get it at Viper’s web page here.
My domain is managed by me on my own name servers. When I moved to Long Island I lost my static IP addresses from my DSL line. So I moved both my DNS servers to Stefan’s house via his DSL line.
Not a good idea for availability. Since both DNS servers were there, any connectivity issues meant my domain disappeared. I had setup my basement server to queue up mail, but if the name servers became unreachable then no one could figure out to send mail to the other box.
Yesterday I went to http://www.tektonic.net/ and ordered a virtual private server from them. I picked the UM1 which is 10GB of disk space, 256MB RAM, on a Dual AMD Opteron 246. I selected SUSE 10.0 paid online and I’m good to go.
It’s a little different. I selected SUSE because that is what I use. Once I setup the yast repository I added bind, apache, php5, etc. and ran the online update. It’s very easy to forget that this is all virtual and on a shared box. The responsiveness is very good. I contacted my domain registrar, updated the record and poof all done.
Just for kicks I moved this blog onto this new server. I’ll see how it goes, but so far there have been no surprises.
Or what I do for a living. But follow this link anyway:
http://www.matasano.com/log/384/oh-the-bad-crypto-youll-see-an-open-letter/
I don’t know anyone who tries to write there own crypto code (I hope) but I run into items 2 and 3 often enough to make me say things like “and to think, he can vote too”.
This blog was running on Stefan’s DSL connection and with me tinkering with it I was using up his bandwidth. Usually when he was trying to connect to the office and get some work done.
I have a very good connection to the Internet via Optimum Online. It’s a dynamically assigned address but does not change and even if it does I run a dynamic DNS client to tell my DNS server when I’ve moved. So I decided that I would move the blog and change the whole URL. Easy right?
Setting up the virtual server
I added to my DNS zone dembowski.net a new record for blog.dembowski.net:
blog.dembowski.net. 3600 IN CNAME dixie.dembowski.net.
A while back I switched my server’s Linux distribution from Fedora to SuSE. One of the appeals was that SuSE comes with a reasonable configuration tool called yast.
Yast has a section for creating virtual hosts in Apache, and I thought how hard can this be?
After killing lots of time and totally breaking the web server configuration I ended up removing the Apache packages, deleting /etc/apache2 directory and /etc/sysconfig/apache2 file (options and configs remain even if you remove the software packages).
# rpm -e apache2-mod_php5 apache2-prefork apache2
# rm -rf /etc/apache2 /etc/sysconfig/apache2
I used yast to re-install the same packages, ran the online update, configured apache and got back a basic no frills web server running.
Most Linux distributions have put a conf.d directory in Apache’s configuration directory. It works like this: any file with the extension .conf gets included in the configuration. I knew about this but figured using yast would be easier.
So much for that idea. I went into yast one last time to enable the apache modules php5 and rewrite. Enabling mod_rewrite is not enough, you also need to turn on the FollowSymLinks option or it just does not work.
The configuration file I created in /etc/apache2/conf.d contains the following lines
NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName dixie.dembowski.net
DocumentRoot /srv/www/htdocs
ServerAdmin webmaster@dembowski.net
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/dixie.dembowski.net-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/dixie.dembowski.net-access_log combined
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName blog.dembowski.net
DocumentRoot /srv/www/htdocs/wordpress
ServerAdmin webmaster@dembowski.net
RewriteEngine On
<Directory /srv/www/htdocs/wordpress>
Options +FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/blog.dembowski.net-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/blog.dembowski.net-access_log combined
</VirtualHost>
Not too complicated really. Now when I point my web browser to either host name I get two different web pages.
Preparing WordPress
First off read this whole article, and seriously this part. The WordPress documentation is really good and helped a lot. Normally you would want to do one or the other; being a “challenging” person I was determined to do both.
I did NOT read the documentation. There is a step where you need to tell WordPress the URI for referencing itself. The documentation says Update Options -> Logout -> “Do not try to open/view your blog now!” They are not kidding around, WordPress sends you to the web page it thinks it is running on and not the host that it actually is running.
Restoring the web server files and directory onto the new box was not a problem. And the mysql backup was edited with vi and I changed all of the references from http://www.dembowski.net/wordpress/ to http://blog.dembowski.net/. I had to have missed one because every time I went to the web page http://blog.dembowski.net/ I was sent to the old server whenever I clicked on anything including the admin web pages.
There probably is a better way to do this but I eventually just put into my workstations hosts file the IP address of the new box and claimed it was www.dembowski.net. Just to play it safe I shut down the old web server, logged into the new box and fixed all of the options with the new info. Once I was all done I removed the bogus entry in my hosts file.
WordPress’s PHP scripts on my box kept running out of memory and crashed. I changed the file /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and changed the memory_limit from 8M to 1632M That seems to have taken care of it.
All that was left to do is make sure that anyone going to the old web page gets sent to the new one. On the old server I changed the .htaccess file in the wordpress directory to now read
RewriteEngine On
RedirectMatch ^/wordpress/(.*) http://blog.dembowski.net/$1 [L,R]
Apache’s mod_rewrite rocks. This took any web requests for http://www.dembowski.net/wordpress/anything and redirected the web browser to go to the new URL with http://blog.dembowski.net/anything.
Blog successfully migrated to a new host and a new directory. Next up putting SSL back on one of my virtual web servers.
