Beware – WordPress Clean It Up Plugin

     If you have a WordPress site here, beware of the “Clean It Up” plugin, a plugin designed primarily to clean up the MySQL database.

     One of it’s functions is to delete unattached files.  Unfortunately, it decided all of my header files were “unattached files” and deleted them.  This may be a problem specific to the twentyeleven theme, or my modified version thereof, I don’t know as that’s the only theme I am using here.

Web Maintenance Tonight 22:00

     I am planning on taking the web server down for about 20 minutes to image the machine tonight around 10PM.  The reason for this is because I’ve made substantial changes including the addition of HTML2 since the last image was made and do not want to lose those in the event of file system corruption or disk failure.

MySQL

     Since moving the web server from Centos 6 to Ubuntu 15.10, it has not been possible to access the MySQL server via a MySQL client on a shell server because of the options Ubuntu compiled in.  Even if I set the bind address to 0.0.0.0, it would still listen only to localhost.

     I have since replaced the Ubuntu version of MySQL with the MySQL Community version (which is also one point issue newer) and this resolved that problem.

     You can now access the MySQL server from a shell server.

Chat

     For your amusement and entertainment there is now a chat system available under Web-Apps->Chat.  This is not the final version of what I intend to be there, it is just a place holder until I get a fully functional XDCC/Jabber Chat working.

     Also, for amusement, Web-Apps>Chat->Carlos, is a chat bot similar to the old Eliza program.

Kudos Apache

     I believe in giving credit where credit is due.

     I recently installed the http2 apache module to provide http2 support on our web server.  After installation I would see processes get stuck in graceful restart after the nightly graceful restart for log rotation.

     I submitted a bug report on bugzilla.

     Two days later I got e-mail with an explanation of what caused the problem and a fix.  I compiled and installed the new http2 module today and it indeed did fix it.

     This is on an Open Source project where people are doing this work gratis.  I’d never see that kind of support from Microsoft or Apple where hundreds of people are getting paid to develop.

 

Anonymous FTP Directories

     I corrected two problems with anonymous ftp that caused directories not to show with the ‘dir’ command, and some directories not to show even with ‘ls’.

     The former was a compile time option, ‘enable-ls’, necessary on Ubuntu, and the latter was old paths in /etc/ftpaccess that have been wrong for many moons (probably since I changed directory structures back in 2012).