May 04, 2006
Comment spam bonanza
It seems that MovableType's basic comment spam defense is working. All spams are neatly tucked in the "Junk Comment" tab while two spams escaped the junk comment rating.
I need to put more anti-spam plug-ins to buff up the defense. Unfortunately I couldn't get the CAPTCHA plug-in to work. With this current anti-spam measure those spam still made it to the system, I'd like it to not enter the system at all if I can help it.
Posted by vhadiant at 07:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 03, 2006
Upgrading MovableType (for real this time)
Not happy with my previous upgrade attempt since it pretty much destroys all the existing files I tried another MovableType 3.2 upgrade attempt. This time it's much more successful.
You can pretty much disregard the instruction on MovableType website for "upgrading" MovableType installation. This is what you need to do:
1) Backup everything, including your MovableType's database. I'm using BerkeleyDB so it's very easy for me.
2) Extract MovableType's tar.gz file into a new directory
3) Fix your mt-config.cgi. For me there are only two (yes two) settings that I need to fix. The path for my new MT 3.2 install and the location of the datasource. Point the datasource to the old MT 3.1x BerkeleyDB
4) On your web browser go to your new MovableType 3.2 directory's mt.cgi. That will automatically sets the upgrade process and voila you're done.
This way my templates, old generated files are still the same. One thing that I still couldn't figure out is that I can't see all the comments on the comments list. They are there if I go to the individual entries but a lot are missing from the main comments page. I hope this is not a sign of a corruption again.
Posted by vhadiant at 09:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 02, 2006
"Upgrading" MovableType
Fed up with the lack of anti-spam plug-in for MovableType 3.1x I've decided to once again tried to upgrade to MovableType 3.2.
Once again I was thwarted by the cryptic Perl error messages. This time though I had my resolve to use MovableType 3.2. I found out that installing it fresh seems to work, so rather than doing an "upgrade" I exported the content of my old blogs and imported back to the new installation.
It seems to work good enough, but it does have a few drawbacks:
1) Archives by default are stored in the root blog directory. I didn't realise this because before all my archives are neatly stored under the "archives" directory.
2) MT 3.2 seems to generate different filename than the MT 3.1x for items with longer name.This is the new filename while this is the old one. I suspect a few my internal links will be broken if I don't leave the old files.
But apart from those two issues, arguably quite bad if a blog is popular but mine is not, everything seems to be working quite well.
Next step is to customise the styles, at the moment both blog have the standard styles that come with the default install. It actually looks better than my old one :)
Posted by vhadiant at 10:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 18, 2005
Very simple comment spam protection
This is a really dumb and simple hack, but when I removed the "Post" option from the comment page (forcing to "Preview" first rather than "Post") my comment spam drop to zero.
Update: This is really amazing. I haven't got any comment spam since I do this.
Posted by vhadiant at 12:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 29, 2005
MovableType 3.2
Seems that SixApart has finally released MovableType 3.2. However since my last debacle trying to upgrade to 3.2 Beta I'll have to be extra careful trying to upgrade.
Posted by vhadiant at 11:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 31, 2005
MT-Blacklist install woes
I'm not having a good day. Well after my MT 3.2 BETA install woes I decided to install MT-Blacklist to help me deal with the trackback spam that I've been getting recently. In fact that was the main reason I was playing with MT 3.2 BETA.
So I downloaded MT-Blacklist, followed the instruction and damn it I got that "Internal Server Error" again! @!###$ I almost give up because I have no access to the server log. Somehow I remembered that MT has the "Activity Log", so I thought to give a shot, and yes I was right there was something there:
Plugin error: plugins/Blacklist/Blacklist.pl Can't locate warnings.pm in @INC (@INC contains: plugins/Blacklist/lib ./extlib ./lib /usr/lib/perl5/5.00503/i386-linux /usr/lib/perl5/5.00503 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/i386-linux /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005 .) at plugins/Blacklist/Blacklist.pl line 30. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at plugins/Blacklist/Blacklist.pl line 30.
So just like the error message says, it couldn't find warning.pm. This file apparently doesn't exist in Perl 5.005. That sucks, I Google for that error message and there's two hit saying that MT-Blacklist requires at least Perl 5.006. Apparently there's Perl 5.6.0 in my webserver. I modified all MT-Blacklist cgi file to point to this Perl instead of the 5.005 version and tried again, this time mt-bl-load.cgi works. Woohoo! I thought this is it, finally something work today. So I followed the next step and it took a bloody long time to continue, and after about 5 minutes guess what I got .... another "Internal Server Error".
That's it enough for today, have to wait for next weekend for this. I think I have to disable trackback for now, to do this I think simply by removing the execute permission on mt-tb.cgi:
chmod gou-x mt-tb.cgi
I hope that will work.
Posted by vhadiant at 04:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
MovableType 3.2 BETA install woes
Blah ... I couldn't get MovableType 3.2 BETA to work. I'm really surprised really, everyone said that the upgrade process is painless, however I keep getting "Internal Server Error". God knows what it is since I'm in web host and I don't have access to the server log (or at least I think I don't). Thankfully I had backup for everything, so remember if you want to upgrade to MT 3.2 BETA make sure you backup everything before continuing (and don't forget your template files as well).
Posted by vhadiant at 03:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 01, 2005
MovableType, Rebooted!
Well my worst fear has been confirmed. Kymberlie from SixApart support has said that those error messages that I've been seeing are most likely a sign of database corruption. However it couldn't have been that bad because now I can see my entries, although I saw some weird things happening in my MT install. I think I know what's happening here, for some reason my hosting provider is running out a disk space where my MT DB is located, I saw a couple of warning messages saying that the group quota has been exceeded. According to the manual, running out of disk space could result in DB corruption. Anyway it sucks, because I'm no way near my disk space limit on my hosting provider, it's just they're running out of disk space. I've already complained about this to Hostway.
Anyway I was thinking to leave it just as it is, but now I couldn't generate the feeds because there's problem with the ID, so I thought the better of it and decided to reboot my MT installation. Fortunately the database corruption wasn't that bad so I could export all my entries into a text file. The templates are still good too, so I just copy and paste everything to my local file. This time I'm going to use the link to file trick, just in case some disaster happen in the future it'll save me from copy and pasting the file.
So I downloaded the latest MovableType, version 3.16 now, and reinstalled everything from scratch. Fortunately installing MovableType is very easy, also this is my third attempt, so yeah pretty smooth. Importing to MovableType is also a breeze, you only need to create an import directory under the MT installation root, and drop the exported file there. From the MT admin screen select Import/Export and click Import and it's done.
All in all it took me about 2 hours to rebuild my 2 weblogs from scratch.
PS: Backup is very important! Read here for tips and tricks that could save your arse.
Posted by vhadiant at 09:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 30, 2005
Panic!
Whoops I'm in a bit of panic. Just now I lost all my blog entries. It started when I'm about to post on Sydney's public transport on Misspelt, it threw an error and suddenly all my entries dissapear, just like that!. On MovableType main menu, when I log in I can see my two blogs on the main menu, the total entries (which is correct) but I can't see the entries! Strange, I can see the list of comments and trackbacks but try as I might I can't coerce MT to show the entries.
After fooling around for a while somehow it reappeared, and my last entriy on Misspelt is duplicated. I tried to delete the duplicates but I could only delete 1 and the other 2 still there and at the bottom of MT I saw this bunch of error message:
substr outside of string at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 58.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 58.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 59.
substr outside of string at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 59.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 60.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 59.
substr outside of string at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 59.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 60.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 59.
substr outside of string at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 59.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 60.
substr outside of string at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 58.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 58.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 59.
substr outside of string at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 59.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 60.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 59.
substr outside of string at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 59.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 60.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 2442.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 59.
substr outside of string at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 59.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/Serialize.pm line 60.
Use of uninitialized value at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 2442.
I tried to check what the heck happen on Serialize.pm 58, but I forgot that Perl is the only programming language that looks the same before and after source code encryption, grrh ... what's going on MT, I thought you're a stable and rock solid platform.
Bah it's late now, I'll have a look again tomorrow, and wait what people on the MT forum said about this problem. Going to click "Save" now, hoping it'll be OK.
Posted by vhadiant at 10:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
