Tech, filmmaking, & thoughts.
Fixes
Spoofed Bingbot attacks against WP
Feb 2nd
# Updates # 02/04/12 – Revised wording to reinforce Bing’s perspective # 02/02/12 – Modified block code to identify bingbot as ‘badbingbot’ in case ‘bingbot’ is already being used somewhere
In the last 24 hours, I have seen a large scale attack on the admin logins for thousands of WordPress sites. The attackers are using the User Agent ‘Bingbot’. Bingbot certainly is NOT the culprit in these attacks, but is, unfortunately, being spoofed. These spoofing bots are attacking the wp-admin page. So far, I have only seen this affect WP Mage and Mage Monster users.
A brute force attack on any login is More >
Auto fix for file permissions and ownership
Oct 22nd
# Updates: # 05/10/12 | Bug fix for file names that contain special characters. # 01/26/12 | New feature rich script written by Colin R.
suPHP and FastCGI require files and folders to have a specific set of permissions/ownership from other handlers. Without these permissions set you will see a lot of errors such as: “403 Forbidden”, “500 Internal Server Error”, or simply generic errors that commonly have the word ‘permission’ in them.
It can be very time consuming to track down and check file permissions across a whole server. Luckily, fixing this on a cPanel box can be scripted. This gives More >
Fix: Could not edit /home/username/etc/ftpquota
Jan 23rd
#1 – The Problem
When you try to create or modify FTP users in cPanel, you receive: Error. Could not edit /home/username/etc/ftpquota
The only times I have seen this error is when you are transferring a cPanel account over from one web host to another one. The other host is using a non-standard method for the way accounts are set up. In this example, the transfer was coming from SiteGround. Siteground has their users’ etc folders created as Symbolic links as opposed to stored in the users’ home folders.
A quick way to verify if this is your problem is to do More >
Fix: Fantastico is not installed at the default location
Jan 20th
Fantastico De Luxe is an automatic installer for many 3rd party programs such as WordPress, Joomla, and OsCommerce. It integrates directly with your hosting application such as cPanel. Fantastico is most common automation software used by hosting companies. I personally do not prefer Fantastico, instead opt to use Installatron instead. It has a much better interface with many more features.
#1 – The ProblemAfter installing Fantastico De Luxe, you may receive this error when trying to access it from cPanel:
##################### Fantastico is not installed at the default location /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/fantastico. Either move the Fantastico directory from it's current location to /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/fantastico OR enable More >
Fix: Plesk Watchdog error of 01-01-2011
Jan 14th
#1 – The Problem
Ever since January 1st, 2011 (when the new year rolled in), Plesk servers that have Watchdog installed have started giving errors on the crons. Administrators receiving these cron error emails will see something like this:
##################################################### Cron Daemon <root@vps.server.com> to root@vps.server.com date Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 12:15 AM subject Cron <root@vps> /usr/local/psa/libexec/modules/watchdog/cp/pack-sysstats day ERROR: WDExc Error occurred while processing database query: 'MySQL query failed: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'group by service_id, type, round(unix_timestamp(time) / 200, More >
