Category Archives: Blogs

WordPress Under Attack

If you run a wordpress blog, you really should  be aware that there is a global attack on wordpress blogs going on.

It’s coming from a bot net and is an attempt to find blogs that have their admin account enabled with easy to guess passwords.

I noticed the attack a couple of months ago when, while watching my web server log scrolling by, I noticed a significant number of attempts to use the wp-login.php script from random IP addresses.

A bit of research turned up information on the global attack.

Obviously I wanted to do something about it to protect my server.

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To Blog, or not to Blog, that is the question

This post started out as something very different … many months ago.   In fact, the original post still sits in my ‘draft’ list … but will never be posted.

Most of those who know me well understand that I have a lot of opinions (who doesn’t) … and I’m sometimes not afraid to express them.

The original blog post started out as a discussion of religion, politics, and how my views differed drastically from those of my co-workers, friends, and colleagues in the IBM i industry.

But, as I started to write the post (which, I might add, had an incredibly clever title that Ginny helped me come up with), I realized that the content of the post would probably offend a lot of people that I have to work with on a day to day basis, and others that I interact with quite frequently.

What is said on the internet, stays on the internet … forever

– Unknown (but I doubt I came up with it)

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Temporary LIBXML2 solution

Ginny has been bugging me about the problem she’s been having posting to her blog from the iPhone and other third party tools that she uses.

The problem has been narrowed down to a bug in LIBXML2 that causes leading angle brackets “<” to be stripped off of posts when processed through the XMLRPC support in PHP.   I logged the issue in the WordPress bug tracker, and the consensus is that the problem started manifesting after an automatic update applied by Fedora 8.

Well, to solve the problem I’ve moved Ginny’s blog to a temporary server running in a base Fedora 8 install in a VMWare instance.   Luckily WordPress stores most of it’s content in the MySQL database (not the images, unfortunately).   A bit of NFS magic to mount the appropriate directory in the virtual system, and it’s working fine.   The server itself only has Apache, PHP, MySQL client, SSH, and a few other bits & pieces to keep it running.   No automatic updates, GUI, compilers, etc.

Once the bug is fixed (either WordPress, using a different XML processing mechanism, or LIBXML2) I’ll move her server back to the main server.

In the mean time, her blog is going to run in the virtual machine ‘Hobbittown’ (named because it’s small).

Another Convert

Well, it took a long time, but I finally wore her down … I got Ginny to convert her blog from MovableType to WordPress. Not only did she convert her own blog, but her churches website too.

I’m pretty sure she got tired of having to manually manage all the comment and trackback spam she was getting. I kept singing the praises of SpamKarma 2, which reduced the amount of spam I get to next to zero.

It took a bit of work to get the blog converted … the WordPress import didn’t do a perfect job, and Ginny tried out a bunch of themes (and tweaked them as she did), but in the end it seems to be a pretty smooth transition.

Oh yeah, another potential convert in the pipeline … I setup wordpress on my own machine at work as an internal blog … and commented on the VP of R&D’s internal blog that WordPress has a much better commenting system than the Simpblog software they are currently using … he checked out my blog and agreed. They haven’t converted the internal blogs yet, but I think it’s just a mater of time.

[tags]wordpress, SpamKarma[/tags]