I moderate any comments here on my blog. If you have a blog, I hope that you also have humans moderate any comments. Just as there is a competition to get email spam past the filters and into your inbox, there is also a race to get comment spam posted on poorly guarded blogs. How much spam does a small blog like mine attract? Plenty! Lately it has been running about two to five comment spams a day. Continue reading
I manage several CentOS servers, not all of them used for my employer. The CentOS 5.x release has been reasonably stable and these servers have been running it for some time. The most significant concern I’ve seen with these releases was that the version of MySQL provided in the standard repositories is extremely old and newer versions provide better performance. Of course that can be easily changed by using versions from other repositories or source compilations. However, now that the CentOS 6.x releases are available I needed to determine our real-world impact of this software update. Continue reading
A belated “Happy New Year” to each one of those who read / scan this blog. Sometimes “real life” intrudes on my blogging activities — in this case BIG TIME. Much of the software I use and discuss here has been updated since my last posting. The operating systems of OpenBSD and CentOS and the blogging environment of WordPress have all been updated. Even such fundamental products as PuTTY and NTP are newly released.
So the big question is what to mention first? I choose to start with the NTP release, mostly because I’ve found so little written about it. I generally follow the NTP stable release thread. Because of this practice, the systems I manage use an NTP software release in advance of its general availability for those who rely on the operating system package updates. Accordingly, I am quite familiar with the NTP software build process and configuration options. The NTP development and release team delivered a new stable release, ntp-4.2.6p5, just before Christmas on December 24. Continue reading
On July 12, the PuTTY development team, headed by Simon Tatham, released version (beta) 0.61 of their very popular telnet/SSH client software. This is the first release update since 2007, which I feel is a tribute to the great job the PuTTY development team does. This release adds new features, enhances support for Windows 7 and of course fixes several outstanding bugs.
I’ve been using this new software release for a week now on a laptop running Windows 7. Here are my first impressions from using this release update. Continue reading
As several people have mentioned to me, WordPress has released a major update (version 3.2) to their software and a minor update (3.2.1). But I had still not updated my site to use the newest version and had not checked to see if my wp_mem128.patch patch was still needed to avoid the issues with a suhosin memory limit of less than 256 MB. Or even if it still worked.
I apologize for my delay, but I’ve now caught up to the leading edge of the official WordPress software updates. I found that there was a small rewrite in the WordPress code regarding how it increases the memory_limit. My previous patch works only up to version 3.1.4. Continue reading
The CentOS build team officially announced release 5.6 Friday. My servers have been running release 5.5, so I expected quite a few bug fixes. Considering that the RedHat technical notes document is over 400 pages long, it appears that my expectations were reasonable. Continue reading
Today the dedicated folks behind WordPress released a new stable version, 3.1.1. Since it addresses 26 issues, including some security and XSS ones, I decided to update this site immediately. Continue reading
I’ve had a frustrating problem with WordPress here on devio.us. Thanks to assistance from the helpful admins and a bit of research, the problem is now resolved. The problem was that I would frequently get connection errors when I logged into this site. Even worse, when I experienced them I would be unable to connect to devio.us by either SSH or HTTP for about ten minutes. What I really like about experiencing problems is that they Continue reading
