Author: David Goodwin

Recently on the Twitter the following (attached) image came up – presumably legit, of a job advert. Highlights below. It’s almost like someone cut and pasted two job postings together. The phone number does appear to be legit … so perhaps the advert itself is?

Continue reading “Wanted: Developer with interesting skills…. oh, and it’s for the minimum wage… (Is this a joke?)”

One of my customers uses Akismet to protect his various blogs from the masses of spam.

Oddly torwards the end of last week, Akismet started to identify everything as spam, with no error message being returned on check of spam, and the admin dashboard showing the api key/akismet were happy.

I initially thought that perhaps Akismet was just having a bad day, and the problem would go away in a few hours/days time – but this hasn’t been the case. So today, I added in a WordPress plugin to debug the HTTP calls to Akismet to see if that would help identify the problem.

add_action( 'http_api_debug', '_custom_http_api_debug', 10, 5 );

function _custom_http_api_debug( $response, $type, $class, $args, $url ) {    
    error_log( 'Request URL: ' . var_export( $url, true ) );
    error_log( 'Request Args: ' . var_export( $args, true ) );
    error_log( 'Request Response : ' . var_export( $response, true ) );
}

i.e. for a message which was known to be spam :

• http post to : http://xxxx.rest.akismet.com/1.1/comment-check
• Response body of ‘true’ (HTTP 200 status code etc) (which is correct as per http://akismet.com/development/api/#comment-check )

However, what gave me an idea that something was amiss is that if an administrator attempted to mark an incorrectly tagged comment as ham, the following was seen –

• Post to http://xxxxx.rest.akismet.com/1.1/submit-ham
• Response body of ‘Invalid Key’

NFS really can be a major PITA. Our office network has been breaking all day.

This seemed to coincide with moving more of our computers to gigabit ethernet (removing the 100mbit CISCO 7960 phones which their network had been daisy-chained through – and seemed to cause intermittent packet loss)

Here are some tips for others unfortunate enough to use it with Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu Precise (12.04 LTS).

1. On Ubuntu NFS clients, you’ll probably want to use proto=tcp and specify a clientaddr=in the mount options (see the below fstab example). This is especially true if you’ve not got entries for the clients within your local DNS server. If you see ‘clientaddr=0.0.0.0’ and DNS resolution for your clients isn’t working, NFS will not work.
2. Don’t try using the nfs-kernel-server from squeeze-backports – as for some reason this causes portmap to be uninstalled, which (in my case) stops NIS from working.
3. Ensure you increase the number of NFS server processes – see /etc/default/nfs-kernel-server (on the server node).