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| Category : Whiterose Admin (43)
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Went from MT 3.33 to 5.01 today. Mostly for security reasons. Hope it works for my friends who are still blogging here!
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| .:Posted by Michael at 09:04 AM
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Updated To MT 3.33, going to test and see how it works.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 11:02 PM
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I added a style sheet selector, based on the one from Making Light (but I fixed it myself). If you’re a whiterose user and want this functionality, email me.
They styles are ghadawful, but the switcher is a thing of beauty.
Maybe I’ll set it to “ADP Vanilla Styles…”
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| .:Posted by Michael at 01:03 AM
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In order to fix an ‘I dunno why it’s broken’ problem, Our provider had to change our IPs. This means that it will take about a day or two for your machines to see whiterose.org or mail.whiterose.org.
Unless you already can.
I hate depending on other people. Especially when they don’t do the job right.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 09:40 PM
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As a test for some friends who want Captcha to solve the problem of Comments spam in Snorcomments2, I found and installed Authen::Captcha from CPAN. That required Digest::MD5 (which was there) and GD.pm (which was not). GD.pm requires libgd, which requires libpng (and thus zlib) and likes to have libjpeg and freetype2.
Matías Giovannini’s GD on Mac OS X HOWTO was basically solid, but needs to be updated as Pete at RasterWeb noted. It’s good through Step 9, then look at the RasterWeb entry.
Additionally, I found that GD choked with an error saying MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.1 wasn’t good enough. I set that environment variable to 10.3 and it all compiled.
I followed that with cpan GD and cpan Authen::Captcha, both of which compiled.
I took the wwwtest.cgi script from the archive, set the file locations in it, and Bob’s your Uncle. Feel free to test it. It just tells you if it worked or not.
Yes, this is a help guide for myself if I need to do it again…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 11:33 PM
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We’re testing out mod_throttle to see if it helps against rude spiders that like to follow wiki edit links and choke the server, or at least it’s virtual chicken.
We’ll see how it works.
Please report odd (new) problems.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 10:36 PM
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If this continues to amuse me, I’ll post this semi-regularly.
Behind the cut, you can find out if Wayne Dolcefino made the top 0.1% ! (hint: no).
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| .:Posted by Michael at 09:28 PM
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After far too long off the net, Whiterose.org is back. The Spice Mail must flow! and it will.
For those who don’t know, we suffered a lightning strike at Whiterose World Headquarters and lost a lot of electronic gear. The loss of the DSL modem kicked us off the net (although we had dial-up for when we wanted pain). Now we’re back.
Apologies to whiterose users. Things should start fixing themselves now…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 10:20 AM
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Bigger than your average overhaul…
- Replaced old webserver (which was Ginger’s desktop) with my old desktop
- upgraded DB from MySQL 4.0.16 to 4.1.11
- upgraded Server OS from Panther to Tiger
- upgraded Twiki from Bejing to Cairo
- upgraded MT from 3.15 to 3.16
All in all, it should be mostly transparent to users, except for new features and new speed.
Whiterose users, if something doesn’t work, tell me…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 08:41 PM
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First, we are now streaming audio from Ginger’s laptop to the wireless hub to the second wireless hub into the bedroom stereo to the new speakers in the living room. It’s amusingly circular.
Second, the trackback spam killing script seems to be working. It’s clobbered 1276 trackbacks today, about 1200 of them in a 110 minute period. I don’t know how responsive it was during that time, but that’s 1276 trackbacks that didn’t have to get processed.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 08:28 PM
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The Mighty Whiterose Blogging Server is, in real life, a lowly PowerMac G3/350 with 512MB of memory. It has, generally, a few 100 MB available to handle user requests for stuff as they come in.
Scumbag Maggots selling Google PageRank do so by making it look like your site (which updates frequently) links to their penis enlargement clients. They can do this with comments or they can do this with trackbacks, both nice features of Movable Type to extend the web-based conversation on a topic posted here.
MT can be extended to use blacklists, moderation, nofollow tags and other mechanisms to prevent these people who are are selling your web space from getting any benefit out of it. However, the Scumbag Maggots put up their ads in an indiscriminate fashion: they don’t care if some or even most sites are protected as long as some aren’t. In order to get as high a return as possible, they use automated spamming scripts coming from random IPs (which they may or may not have legitimate access to use).
What is the intersection of the size of Whiterose and the escalating war between spammers and anti-spammers? It’s that Trackback floods from spammers can easily spawn 50 processes on whiterose at 5M each and cause the server to stop responding to new requests.
We tried several options, including rebooting the server, stopping the web server, and running under mod_perl, but nothing really solved the issue.
What did work for us was the following script, which we’re leaving running on Whiterose.org until we come up with a better solution.
The main loop does the following:
- gets the list of running processes for user www
- pares that list to only the ones with mt-tb.cgi in them
- trims the remaining list to only the process IDs
- counts the running mt-tb.cgi processes
- compares that to my spam-attack threshold
- kills every trackback process during a spam attack
- goes to sleep for a variable amount of time
- repeats
This won’t work if you’re running under mod_perl or if you can’t run a shell script as a user who can kill processes run by the web server. It will kill “real” trackbacks that come in during an attack.
For us, it’s the difference between an unreachable web-server and one that may be slower but still works.
Comments and suggestions welcome. It’s my first useful shell script effort.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 10:37 AM
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So, I added MT-Keystrokes to our server last night. It’s a cool plugin that stops comments that are entred without at least one keystroke in the text field or a click of the submit button. It brilliantly stops spam which comes from evil botnets.
If you install it properly. Which I, unfortunately, did not.
The key here is that I didn’t realize that the templates had to be updated for the preview form as well as the comment forms.
So basically, I denied comments only from careful, thoughtful posters.
It should be all over now. I hope.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 08:26 PM
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If you’ve never looked at the Whiterose homepage, it’s a useful index of all the resources we have on the webserver. All the policies, blogs, wikis and personal pages we host are there in one place.
Why today? Because Amy has moved herself (including her personal and professional (directing) blogs) to amyleland.net Sniff! Our little girl, all grown up!
For me, this meant I got to learn how to use mod_rewrite. The docs say that you’ll either run screaming from the disaster that it is or else you’ll find it to be a super-powerful tool and use it all the time to become a super-powerful tool yourself. I plan to be closer to the latter than the former.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 09:46 PM
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Jay Allen, who has been saving the world from Comment and Trackback Spam with his MT-Blacklist plugin is the new Product Manager for Movable Type at Sixapart. That’s good news indeed.
Today’s goodness is a post by Jay about the comment spam load issue that has recently allowed some whoreson bastard to reduce our web server to a crawl by sending a few thousand trackback pings at it in a couple of hours. They have several performance problems fixed in development. We’ll be likely to upgrade to this pretty quickly after it’s released, as it should significantly improve our server hardness to this unintentional DDOS attack.
Kudos to Jay and may he have a successful career at 6A balancing these unsexy but important fixes with shiny new features.
Update:Kuff is noticing the same thing on the 6A log, although I don’t think he’s seen Jay’s latest.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 06:58 AM
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Once more we’ve restored our backup and reinstalled 3.1.2.1 Let’s see if the third time is, indeed, a charm
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| .:Posted by Michael at 09:29 PM
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Trying out MarsEdit. I like the live preview. I was disappointed with ecto and have been looking for a good replacement. This one comes free with NetNewsWire, so I thought I’d give it a chance. We’ll see how it does with multiple blogs, LJ, etc…
The now playing feature should be on the interface, but that’s a small issue.
Currently playing in iTunes: Rerun by The Judys
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| .:Posted by Michael at 12:24 PM
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I’ve just added the Mt Close Comments. It automates closing comments.
We’ll try the following command
<!— <MTCloseComments old=”45” inactive=”3”> —>
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| .:Posted by Michael at 09:00 AM
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The long saga of MovableType licensing takes a new turn today as Six Apart announces new licensing
It answers all of our needs and we “purchased” it (really just registered, since our previous donations applied). We won’t be installing it immediately (since it’s missing some features we want, like a version of Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist, but we’re licensed for it when the consumer release comes out.
And who knows, I may work on developing the changes I want for MT myself…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 05:21 PM
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In the continuing quest for an equitable license from SixApart, I’ve replied to their letter in response to my license inquiry. I’d posted my concerns already, but I felt (and was told by Jay) that it was important to make them clear to SixApart.
So to be perfectly clear, this isn’t some hypothetical bizarre abuser with 50 users, it’s me with 39 and SixApart says I need to pay more and puts up a punishing license scheme to get it.
Anyway, for those that are following along at home, I’ve commented on the license and asked for better pricing and terms. More updates if I hear more.
This is what I sent in reply to their note.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 08:35 AM
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Six Apart updated their license terms based on the negative feedback they received from many, many users.
Many of the changes are good (redefinition of what counts as a ‘blog’, removal of the CPU limit), but the author/blog limit is still there and SixApart hasn’t addressed what the licensing model they’re using does to group blogs.
Furthermore, I’m the bad guy.
Our best explanation for the tiering is that we feel a personal user who sets up weblogs for 50 of his friends should pay more for a license than one who uses only one weblog for himself.
Almost but not quite an exact description of our use. We have 39 users and 13 blogs. At $100 for the base pay version + $10 for each blog or author > 5, we’d owe for base costs + $420. If the base is $100 ($70 on sale), they’d want $490 from us if we upgraded immediately.
That’s a bunch.
Typepad costs $14.95/month with unlimited authors and blogs. 6A is asking me for 2 years and 8 months at that rate, up front, for more limited service. I’m not gonna jump right away (because I hope they fix this), but I’m sure leaning towards “I can tell where I’m not wanted.”
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| .:Posted by Michael at 06:56 AM
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SixApart has published the Movable Type License Options, and none of them meet our usage pattern.
I’ve written to SixApart and asked them what they expect us to do, but I don’t have an answer yet. We may switch…
What I told them is below. I’ll follow up here when they reply. It is not inconceivable that whiterose will find another blog tool.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 07:32 AM
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No longer a mere empty exoskeleton of her former self, whiterose.org is once again available to bloggers, commenters, wikipaediests, ftp users, et al.
There will be a reboot soon, after which you all will get mail, but the good news is, it’s all gonna work…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 09:58 PM
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Taking Whiterose.org to Panther. Hold on, here it comes…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 10:27 PM
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Well, I was updating CPAN and it decided to update Perl from 5.6.0 to 5.8.2. Since I plan to update the server to Panther, I’m letting it go ahead. If MT fails for you, let me know…
Testing to see if we’ve come up in Perl 5.8.2
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| .:Posted by Michael at 01:01 PM
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The big tech day started with an unpleasant discovery. The DSL was down. After about an hour, including 10 minutes waiting for a level 2 support rep and breakfast at Casacombo, the rep said “OK, try it now!” And lo, it worked.
After lunch was the long-delayed hardware stuff.
First it was dead battery that kept telling the iMac Mailserver that it was January 1, 1904.- Digging out the iMac takeapart from the web
- reviewing how to get the beastie apart enough to change the CMOS battery.
- Taking a trip to Radio Shack.
- Turning the screws (Lefty Loosey, Righty Tighty).
- Making a trivial battery replacement.
- Refolding the map.
- Lying on the floor shaking the case over my head trying to dislodge a dropped heat shield screw.
- Answering the phone.
“Tell him I’ll get the mail server back up soon but I’ve been unexpectedly delayed by having to answer the phone.”
- Rebooting the iMac
- Resetting the clock
- Closing Up the server closet
Then it was the UPS and the 10.2.8 update for the web server. No problems there. Damn UPS doesn’t support OS X software. Oh, well.
Finally, my DVD-ROM died. Two months ago. Way out of warranty. And the External CD-RW’s power supply died last winter. Hmm, what if I transplanted the drive into the CPU? What happens is a dead DVR-ROM and a dead external case and a working CD-RW in my tower. Yay, me! And again, yay the Internet for providing a takeapart.
Tomorrow we work on changing lightbulbs and taking out the trash…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 10:39 PM
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Cranked WRMT to 2.63. So far, smooth sailing. Now to tell the users!
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| .:Posted by Michael at 05:44 PM
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Unqualified Offerings kindly noticed our distress with Movable Type.
We had database corruption, which in not catching, but is painful. I found out more than I was interested in about how MT works and what the toolset is to work on it if it is injured.
We ended up with a solution of sorts. We created several different instances of MT, each with their own database files.
There are three results of this decision, which we are still in the process of implementing.
- Damage to one blog does not affect the others
- Search can be configured for each blog
- Old permalinks are dead (sorry…)
Ben Trott gets our thanks for supporting us and working to salvage our entries database over the weekend. Thanks, Ben.
Other (read bigger) blogs will be back on-line as we finish the transition, which should be no later than end of day.
The moral of the story is: back up your blog on a schedule of appropriate frequency.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 06:53 AM
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This is the first entry done with Movable Type 2.0. Lets see how well it works…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 08:39 PM
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So instead of fixing all the damn templates that I hate on Ones and Zeros, or writing actual content, I find that I spent the evening messing with GUI routing tables and rebuilding the old Milleneum Falcon, our mailserver of yore. Now we’re running two servers.
Yesterday I put togather the hospital-cage for Duncan, who is recovering from a cancerous tumor. He’s got a funnel on his head, which means he’ll never be considered ‘cool’ on the ferret playgrounds if word gets out…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 12:52 AM
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Ones and Zeros basic template converted from DIVs to Tables. That should clear up some problems.
The archives and the comment page aren’t done. Soon, soon…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 12:40 AM
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I’ve deleted the old Ones and Zeros content from Blogger. A bit more work and I can shut down the old stuff. Still figuring out what to do about my archives. Probably I’ll leave them around so that I don’t kill anyone’s links.
Also for tomorrow: Finishing touches on the Great Whiterose Blog Search Engine! More news as it happens…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 01:56 AM
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I think I’ve got the style sheet done, or at least done enough for now. I’ve got an experiment on this entry, which is the “Allow Comments” feature. Please tell me what you think of the design, the colors, anything that doesn’t work on your browser, etc.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 10:26 AM
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So, the project nears completion. We have moved the server from MacOS 9 to MacOSX, which is a pretty big jump. We figured out the FTP glitch (thanks, macfixit). We installed CPAN modules and Movable Type and we upgraded parts of Apache. We transferred 39 blog entries and changed their titles.
It’s been a long but productive day. Tomorrow: Template Twiddling!
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| .:Posted by Michael at 01:12 AM
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Movable type test, prior to Blogger Export…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 11:56 PM
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You’re not going to see this until after the task is finished, and possibly for a while after that, but step one of the great move to Movable Type is underway. I have installed MacOS X on whiterose.org and now I’m installing all the software patches and updates. When it’s done, I ‘ll install MT and configure Apache and get the mail server back up. Then we’ll work on transferring the blog entries to the new system. No ETA, and I won’t jinx it.
Update:The mail server is back up. Weirdly, it’s faster. I have no idea why. Two hours to go from OS 9.2.1 to OS 10.1.2
Update:The web server is back up. This time it’s Apache. Movable Type, Majordomo, Major Cool. For users who don’t need to update anything, we’re in bidness…
Update: Apache is configured and the ftp service settings are in. Now we can use blogger.
Update: Movable Type installed and first blog transferred
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| .:Posted by Michael at 11:14 AM
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Checking it Twice…
Turns out it’s trivial to enable Apache and PERL on OS X. We may bring up Whiterose on Unix sooner than planned…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 07:18 PM
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It looks like it’s nontrivial to run Movable Type on Mac OS 9 so I’m going to have to consider bringing the whole of whiterose.org to Mac OS X, Unix, Apache, majordomo, etc. to get it. But it may be worth it.
If for nothing else, then because I like the idea of another technical challenge.
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| .:Posted by Michael at 11:27 PM
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So, since I changed the style sheet for Ones and Zeros, I found that I couldn’t stop, but had to update every page I own on Whiterose. Now they’re all going to look like this page, except I’m too lazy to put in all the boxes and bars…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 08:39 PM
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More messing with the template. Fixed the style sheet problem which was preventing me from setting font sizes. If listened to my wife, I wouldn’t mess with the templates as much as I do.
But I can’t help myself. Now i have in-line archive links and a single external stylesheet. Whee.
I also added a link to Blogsnob. It’s a truly misnamed service akin to LinkExchange, except only for blogs. It acts as a blog randomizer. Click it if you feel the desire to see who else is promoting themselves.
However, the links above it are, for good or ill, the ones I actually recommend…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 01:41 AM
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I spent too much time messing with the template. I probably I should’ve just left it at ‘close enough’.
Now I, too can begin the months-old Blogging tradition of commenting on other people’s Blogs…
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| .:Posted by Michael at 05:38 PM
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