BenV's notes

Those of you running Slackware 14 or current probably have noticed the move to the Apache httpd v2.4 already.
On my webservers I haven’t yet dared to upgrade from the stable 2.2 version, but I figured it might be a good time to test out an upgrade procedure.

Notable problems / changes

This new version of the Apache httpd brings a few things that you should really pay attention to before attempting to upgrade. Well, you could ignore it, but it would surprise me if you wouldn’t end up with a broken webserver 😉
So you might want to look into these things:

1. Configuration syntax changes
2. Handling the Pleuris-Hoeren-Paaltjes aka PHP disaster
3. Switching to the MPM-event module

Of course you’ve already done your homework and read upgrading to 2.4 from 2.2, right? 😉 (continue reading…)

Since I was in another update mood I decided to take a quick look at my notes.
The admin page mentioned something about the new 3.0 version.
Obviously I immediately became very excited and ran to the bathroom.
After screaming for half an hour I made a backup of the wordpress dir and sql and wondered if the auto-upgrade button would work.
Always a surprise…. but it worked! It actually worked! (continue reading…)

Here we go again, wordpress has an update to version 2.9 this time.

New features include “automatic database optimization support”, which you can enable by putting define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true); in your wp-config.php file.
The rest you’ll run into yourself, it’s a ton of new stuff and fixes but some cool stuff like a built-in image editor and easier embedding of your favorite youtube junk.

Needless to say the automatic upgrade failed AGAIN for me:

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.9.zip.

Installation Failed

Fortunately, my previous patch still works. Get it here if you want.

After patching that single line the automagic upgrade ended with: WordPress upgraded successfully. Jeeeej.
However, they still left the timeout at 60 seconds in the newer version 🙁

# grep wp_remote_get wp-admin/includes/file.php
$response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 60));

Failers. They deserve a 56k6 modem for their servers so they can find out about these issues themselves 😉

Version 2.8.5 is here! Some important security hardening going on, fixing a trackback DoS attack (or so they claim). Some more details over here. As usualy the automatic update failed for me, so once again the fix for this error:

Download failed.: Operation timed out after 60 seconds with 1538482 bytes received

Either patch it manually:

• Edit wp-admin/includes/file.php and change line 448 to a more reasonable default.
• The line sould become something like: $response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 600));

Or use this patch:

--- wp-admin/includes/file.php.org 2009-10-21 17:03:47.000000000 +0200
+++ wp-admin/includes/file.php 2009-10-21 17:03:06.000000000 +0200
@@ -445,7 +445,7 @@
if ( ! $handle )
return new WP_Error('http_no_file', __('Could not create Temporary file'));

if ( is_wp_error($response) ) {
fclose($handle);

[Download not found]

When I tried adding the above patch as a download (using the download monitor plugin) I got this failure:

File type does not meet security guidelines. Try another.

What the fuck guys, this is a TEXT file. Grepping through the sources I find the wp-admin/includes/file.php file to be the nazi. Apparently I’m not allowed (as site admin) to pass this current_user_can( 'unfiltered_upload' ). Security hardening, yeah… against idiots perhaps.
I’m expecting an update of either wordpress or the download monitor plugin soon.
Meanwhile I simply uploaded the file manually and added an existing download. Pfffrt, the hassle.

Meh.
Yet another security issue….
“Prutsers”. Oh well, at least they fixed it.

As for the upgrade, once again I had to manually increase their timeout to more than 60 seconds.
Just for reference:
Edit wp-admin/includes/file.php with your favorite editor and change line 448 so it has a more reasonable timeout, I put it to 300:

$response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 300));


It seems to be update day today….

I felt like updating my shit today. Somehow I enjoy updates so I do it whenever I see interesting stuff.
So glancing through the slackware changelog I noticed a new Apache2 version (2.2.12 with a bunch of security updates). Meh, not my favorite piece of garbage to upgrade, but local upgrades were easy enough and also the remote (slackware 11, custom builds) ones went without hickups. (continue reading…)