GuardianAngel

Hi Paul!

Sorry for the delayed reply…

It works now, thank you!

So the problem was mainly the “search_links” as I initially built it correctly, I tried to change from TITLE to TEXT1 when I saw that it did not work but misunderstood the instructions you had given and only did it in one place…

I have not had time to check how to set the default parameters in the backend settings but will do so as soon as possible.

Thank you for the great plugin and for your help!

Nick

Sent…

Thank you!

Nick

Hi Paul!

I am using version 3.2.4 on WordPress 4.0.

I tried both pasting the code as above in visual mode (but I made sure it got pasted as text and pasting it in text mode.

(Pasting it in visual mode had the end result of converting the ampersands to their HTML entities…)

Is it ok if I send you a link using the email address in the plugin?

Thank you and have a nice day!

Nick

Hi Paul!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work in my case…

Could anything in my setup affect this? I have a multisite setup, could this be the cause?

Thank you!

Nick

Hi Mika!

Just to let you know what I ended up doing…

I did a backup of my DB as you suggested but before trying to hack it I checked if there was a way to fix it without resorting to that… As I am far from an expert in WordPress I thought it would be best if I tried the easier solutions first…

In my DOS days I directly altered a database structure by using an HEX editor but I knew what I was doing, I can’t say the same for hacking a WordPress database…

So, once I had my backup I did some tests…

Now it looked like the main problem with my third network was the fact that the upload path was set and it should not have been I believed…

I cleared it and it seemed to behave normally…

So what I did was export the sites I wanted to export from the second network and deleted it…

I then recreated it…

It behave like the third network, everything seemed good AFAICT expect for the upload path, I cleared it…

I reimported the sites I had exported and fixed a few broken links…

It now behaves as it should I believe…

I am no PHP expert (I am a programmer though, not just a PHP programmer) and it looks like it’s the multi-network plugin I use that setted that upload path in this way so I will have to contact the plugin author again about this so we can figure out why his plugin consistently set the upload path to something wrong on my install…

By the way, I found a note somewhere which suggests that image was initially of 3.8 but from what I have read blog.dir was no longer in use for 3.8, right?

Thank you!

Nicolas

Hi bcworkz!

Sorry for the delayed reply…

That definitely gave me a good idea of how I could do it, thank you!

If I find any further information on this I will post back…

Once again thank you!

Nick

Hi!

It should be /wp-content/uploads/sites/SITE_ID/ actuall

So it should be like the first network which does have that structure, right?

That may be a problem, then, because if the ‘image’ had a poorly done install of WP, that would explain a lot.

The weird thing is that that poorly installed WordPress did behave normally until I added networks…

The thing I don’t get is why the second network and the third behave in very different way… If the install of the first network is somehow corrupted (but still gives the expected results as far as image upload path is concerned) and it is used as some sort of template for the second and the third then why do I end up with verrry different things for the second and third network? I end up with blogs.dir for the second network and something similar to one of the problems you had for the third network (/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/sites/26/…) because the upload_path got set for the sites of this network automagically.

(It’s 25 now instead of 23 as I destroyed the network and recreated it and the new upload_path is wp-content/uploads/sites/25…)

The third network appears to behave similarly to the first network with the exception that this time the upload paths got set… If I cleared them then I think it would behave normally but why did they get set in the first place?

That said, NEVER use an ‘image’ to install WordPress. It prevents WP from being able to auto-detect and properly set things up.

I definitely learned my lesson and I wished I could restart with a clean database… If I exported everything with EXPORT, IMPORTed it back in a clean database and altered the path to the images would this have a better chance of ending up with a working install which would not do something else weird the next time I create another network?

I could hack my config as you suggested but what I am afraid of is keeping that corruption which makes it behaves differently each time I create a new network so if exporting and importing into a new database has a better chance of getting rid of the “corruption” then I would go that way.

The second network has barely any images so I could re-upload them or I could move them from their incorrect location to the correct one too and the third network was only done as a test for now…

So, what would be best in my case?

Thank you very much for your help and have a nice day!

Nick

Hi!

No, no CDN/Cloudflare here…

Some of the entries it complain about do not actually exist, they are handled by a wildcard DNS CNAME…

In one of my examples above:

<<
Old DNS records: blog1.example.com points to example.com
New DNS records: https://www.example.com points to example.com
>>

only https://www.example.com actually exists, blog1.example.com is actually handled by *.example.com…

They are comparing together records which should not be compared, https://www.example.com and *.example.com…

Thank you and have a nice day!

Nick

Oops, sorry, I am not sure how I missed that one…

Sorry for the noise…

Nick

Hi esmi!

Sorry for the delayed reply…

It does work now, I can actually access my server by SSH (and even using some sort of VNC)

What I did the day before was try out many Twitter plugins, only one of them was still installed the next day (when I noticed the problem) and this plugin is very simple (it only adds a widget) and has no code for this….

What was weird is that once I fixed it, it got added one more time (as if what had added it had run one more time) and then never again…

I doubt this was an attempt to hack as this seems to be more meant to armor a server than to make it hackable if I understood what it does correctly so I can only assume a plugin added it (a plugin I removed I guess as I scanned all the plugins and could not find “suhosin” line in any of them…).

Just in case I asked my VPS provider and this was their reply

“We do not have any access to your VPS. We are not actually able to change anything involving your configuration”

This was essentially the answer I expected to receive from them but I wanted to make sure just in case…

This is verrrry weird…

Thank you and have a nice day!

Nick

Sorry for the delayed reply…

I had given links to WebPageTest.org, Ultratools.com (https://www.ultratools.com/tools/dnsHostingSpeedResult) but what I think really proved my point was querying directly their DNSes using dig (it’s a Bind DNS tool).

something like

dig @name_of_their_server my_domain_name A

calling this over and over would give the results I gave above, some very good, some very bad and sometimes no answer…

By the way, I finally received an answer from them and I am not impressed…

<<I have received a reply from our systems administrator who agreed that these query times are a bit high, but also stated that a response was still given and this would normally be the last server that is queried after ns1-ns3. If no records were retrieved at all, that would be cause for concern.

I do apologize if this has caused any inconvenience, but although our nameservers historically have very good uptime, if 100% uptime is a necessity you may want to consider a paid DNS management service.>>

First, 2-3 of their servers have performance problems, not just ns4…

Second, anybody who knows anything about DNSes knows the order in which records are returned (including NS (name servers/DNS) records) is implementation dependant but is usually randomized…

The answers I got from their servers clearly show their servers randomize the values, they don’t return them in alphabetical order as their system admin said..

So, what did I do?

Another registrar hosts domain they are not even the registrar for free so I switched to them for my DNSes. The idea behind this, and they clearly mention it, is that if your like their DNS hosting when comes to time to renew your domain you might switch to them…

Their DNS servers are not as fast as the registrar of this domain but they are never anywhere near that slow so it’s good enough for me…

Have a nice day!

Nick

Yes, this is a VPS…

The “provider” implication is minimal and if anything their default setup (when they install the “image) was less secure than it should have been….

I have a feeling a plugin added that but I am no longer sure which plugin I tried (is this logged somewhere?) and the only plugin that was still installed this morning (of the ones I tried yesterday) is very simple and had no code to do that.

The weirdest thing is that when I saw the problem I tried writing those lines as I thought they were supposed to be written but the corrupted line got appended one last time to my .htaccess when I tried to reaccess my install and then it stopped doing that…

I did a grep of everything under the directory where WordPress is install and I see nothing that matches nphp_value, suhosin, etc…

I am perplexed…

Thank you!

Nick

Hi!

If you are paying for premium support then I think you would get a much faster answer by opening a ticket on their site…

Good luck!

Nick

Just so you know I am still seeing times like these:

;; Query time: 1850 msec

and

;; Query time: 1819 msec

and very good times such as these

;; Query time: 16 msec

and also

;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

Their best performing DNS usually has times around 70-80 ms (so it’s slower than the others when they have good response times) and the worst response time I have seen from it (it’s not scientific though, I just did many DNS lookups in a row) was around 500 ms… (which is kinda slow…)

I am a little reluctant to say their name without having confirmation from Stingraynut he is using the same registrar/DNS hosting but if they don’t fix it soon I won’t be so reluctant to say who they are…

I still haven’t heard back from them by the way…

Have a nice day!

Nick

Stingraynut, who is your registrar and/or where are the DNS resolving your domain(s) hosted?

I reported a very similar problem to my registrar yesterday after tracking down my performance problems to my registrar’s DNSes…

The initial answer from my registrar tech support was that they did not see any problems but after I provided them with additional information they confirmed that they are seeing the problem and have reported them to their systems admins.

I have not yet heard back from them and I am still seeing the problem about a day after I reported the problem/16 hours after they confirmed seeing the problem as well…

These are my last lookups time from one of their DNSes a few minutes ago:

;; Query time: 1768 msec
;; Query time: 1815 msec
;; Query time: 16 msec
;; Query time: 16 msec
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
;; Query time: 1497 msec

As you can see, sometimes I get very good response time and now sometimes the server is unreachable…

I am of course probing only one of their DNSes but 2-3 of their 4 DNSes are showing very slow lookup times like these…

Using Dig (Bind DNS tool), I have seen times over 2 seconds and WebPageTest suggested I even got lookups which took more than 5 seconds…

So, where are your DNSes hosted?

Have a nice day!

Nick