Find out what has been happening with us
Just a quicky advising that I have been able to get everything back up and running after the upgrade to the server from a few weeks ago.
Problems seems to have come from old WordPress plugins, the update to PHP5.3.2.
Performance and stability seem to be back where they were, so no more hours of searching through to find the problems until I go changing something else.
You may have noticed that the site has been coming up and down or has been very slow over the past couple of days. Well I updated to Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS over the weekend, this sort of went smoothly but I’ve found a few issues along the way.
1. Apache goes very slow or stops responding altogether.
2. APC no longer works with Apache.
3. Postfix-Dovecot SMTP authentication no longer works.
The first one is a big problem as it brings the whole server down, so nothing works and you are required to hard boot the box to get back in. It appears to be a problem with the update from PHP 5.2.6 to 5.3.1 there are issues with the Gallery plugin that I use on the site. So after some investigation I have disabled that plugin for now, until I can find a solution to fix the issue.
The APC should work but again does not want to so I have moved back over to Memcache for OPC caching on Apache for now.
The Postfix problem is a real pain, I spent many hours getting this set up in the past and while receiving emails is working I’ll need to go back and redo the other outward configuration again. Unfortunately as I spent some much time getting just right I can’t remember all of the little things that I changed, but looking at these things now I do so with a much better understanding than when I first tried.
The Gallery is still there and working, but linking pictures back via the WPG2 plugin is not working.
Looks like there have been several attempts again to hack the site over the past several days. None of these have been successful and everything is working as expected. Thanks to the several security plugins I now have installed they weren’t able to get in and cause and damage.
Also I’ve been updating the email server set up that I have been using for the past several months from Courier to Dovecot, mainly because Dovecot has managesieves and I have been sick of manually filtering my emails. (managesieves allows for server side mail filter via rules)
This does mean that my last post, which was “Are we all still alive” was not mailed out to people.
I’ve also been selected to the be first user to get and test a new webmail called “Crystal Mail” before it’s release in the next couple of months, it’s based of “Roundcube” but with lots of extra features built in.
So after this has been offically released, I’ll most likely be moving over to this for my web based email.
For some reason the Gallery database corrupted the other night. We did have some power outages so maybe that might have caused it.
This caused the main site to produce some errors when being displayed, all fixed now.
I’ll have some updates on our bath room reno to put up shortly as well.
No more Google News being sent to Facebook
I’ve done some modifications to the plugin used to send posts to my Facebook profile to remove the Google News that updates the site every few hours. So while the Google News posts will still happen on the site to keep things fresh and up todate, these wont get passed on to Facebook and your feeds any longer.
Just have to get a decent plugin that brings comments back in to the site now.
Latest Theme update for site.
Trying out a new theme for the site, this one has a few options of colours that can be used and extra widget areas as well. So far I have settled on the blue colour scheme, it’s a nice change from the greyish theme from before.
I’ve had to modify it a bit to fit some of our content in to the smaller side bars and made it auto sizing for browsers. All in all it not to bad a theme to use.
Enjoy.