adamlang

GD was installed, but imagemagick/imagick was not. Also discovered that this had been going on for a lot longer than I assumed, since about the time I upgraded to 4.7. So that’s nice.

As soon as I installed imagick, this started working fine.

Would, I guess, have been nice to have been informed of new package requirements.

Could this perhaps be a missing php5 plugin for image scaling? I did upgrade my ubuntu recently, and had some problems with missing php5 software when php7 went kablooie. If so, can anyone tell me what I have to install?

Let’s see if I can unpick the portions that are related to my blog. It should be fairly obvious where you have to sub in your own data (‘your-ip-address-here’, etc, but not $host or things like that) but make sure you read through the whole thing or it definitely won’t work when you start it. ??

# What username you want to run under
user  www;
worker_processes  1;

# If you use this you'll have to create /var/log/nginx
error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;
    # don't forget log rotation if you do this on an active site! Or you can just disable
    # the access log entirely.

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    ssl_protocols  TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;  # don’t use SSLv3 ref: POODLE

    # directive for forwarding port 80 requests to ssl
    server {
        listen       your-ip-address-here:80;
        # server_name may not be necessary? Dunno, since performance is not an issue
        # for my port 80 forwarding I never bothered to find out
        server_name  ~.*;

        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    }

    server {
        listen your-ip-address-here:443;
        server_name yourservername.com www.yourservername.com;
        # or whatever list of servernames you like. Make sure that the ssl certificate
        # applies to all of them. If you need a separate ssl certificate you'll need a
        # separate 'server' directive, but it can be more or less identical to this one.

        ssl on;
        ssl_certificate /path/to/your/server/cert/file.crt;
        ssl_certificate_key /path/to/your/server/key/file.key;

        add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=15768000;

        location / {
            # NOTE: You probably won't need this, I just put it in to keep these guys from
            # stealing oodles of my bandwidth to scum their way to the top of google image
            # search using my photos.
            if ($http_referer ~* (becuo|m5x\.eu|galleryhip|pixshark|imgkid|imgarcade|thoughtyoumayask) ) {
                return 403;
            }

            # This can be a domain name, an internal IP address, or your local IP with a
            # different port number.
            proxy_pass https://address-to-forward-requests-to:port-number;
            # If you have people uploading stuff, set this to the largest size you think
            # should be allowed. If not, you can set it much smaller than 20M, 1 or 2 maybe
            client_max_body_size 20M;

            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;

            proxy_redirect off;

            proxy_buffers 64 4k;
        }
    }

    # put any other server directives for any other server names you're running in here.
    # note that even with only a single IP address this lets you use https for all your
    # servers, using TLS SNI. Or you can just use multiple external ips to listen on.

}

I did visit the error logs. They had nothing terribly diagnostic in them.

I just tried the search-replace thing and it did the trick. Thank you very much!

Further info: this appears to happen sometimes when people comment. It has happened during about five distinct periods, and didn’t happen in between. It *may* only happen to spammy comments (no non-spammy comments were found in those time periods, with or without 500 errors — my blog doesn’t get a lot of comments.) So this could be WordPress, or it could be Akismet.

I tried posting a regular comment, and it worked fine. I tried a spammy comment with a new username/email combo, and it went to the spam queue, and didn’t end up with a 500 error. So it’s not happening right now.