mikep

After much testing, this issue has been resolved by UK2 (who I can thoroughly recommend for its responsive support).

During an investigation into this problem, the sys admins found the server had been attacked. This had messed up some of the connections and appeared (to me) to prevent plugin downloads over a certain size. The server has now been fixed.

Quick recap: It initially appeared connections to www.ads-software.com from the affected server were being blocked at the WordPress end. Another possibility seemed to be an SSL issue (see error messages earlier in the thread).

Other servers were able to download without problems. Useful tools for testing included curl and wget. This approach enabled the problem to be reproduced completely outside the WordPress software (thus ensuring other plugins were not interfering). WordPress stated that IPs are not blocked so that idea was dropped.

Curl has good trace facilities at a command line level. PHP has a library for curl so it’s possible to write test scripts (but it’s more convenient and powerful from the command line). There are versions of curl and wget available for Windows as well.

If this happens to you, reproduce the problem outside WordPress as a first step and go from there.

I’ve had a request from my web host following further testing from several servers.

They say “I believe it to be something on the WordPress end breaking the connection. If possible, can you have them search their logs for any connections from our IP address? It is 77.92.69.132. Their connection logs should show what was going on when we were connecting from our IP address.”

The tests were run over the last week involving failed downloads of WordPress plugins outside the WordPress environment. Please post/send the log entries.

The problem is easily reproducible outside the WordPress environment so switching off plugins will have no effect.

I cannot download plugins (e.g. to update) within WordPress (hosted on IP 77.92.69.132).

Plugins cannot be downloaded directly using cURL or WGET from 77.92.69.132 (cURL and WGET being outside the WordPress environment).

Plugins can be downloaded to other IPs (using cURL, WGET or a browser) with no problems.

As the downloads work from other IPs, the conclusion is that 77.92.69.132 may be blocked by downloads.www.ads-software.com (66.155.40.186 – 66.155.40.189). cURL and WGET logs show initial connections, then a fail which suggested (to us) that a block may be in place. But we’re open to more suggestions!

Further to my comment above, you can see the behaviour in the NextGen Gallery template demonstration for captions. First page ok, go to second page and the captions are gone. Click back to the first page and its captions are gone too! Do a browser refresh there, and the captions reappear.

Same as MouseClicks.

Using [nggallery id=x template=caption] if you set Number of images per page: 0 (will disable pagination, all images on one page) you get the descriptions. Set pagination to a number, say 4, then you get the descriptions on the first page only. I’ve made no changes to the NextGEN code. WordPress 2.8.1, NextGEN 1.3.5. Anybody else seen this?

I missed the ad as it was so small! Anyway, all the better that it’s there…click on the ‘ads by google’, then click on ‘send google your thoughts on the ads you just saw’ and fill in the form to complain. This *is* a splog!

Have you asked yourself why your content is being copied?

When I see blogs that are full of copied content like this, it’s hard not to think splog (spam blog). I’ve checked some of the other content and that’s copied too (from https://www.midcurrent.com/news/). Splogs work by ripping off content (often with rss2blog) and using Adsense ads to generate revenue from visitors clicking through. Splogs are a huge problem on the web although this one doesn’t have any Adsense ads yet.

What can you do? Find out all you can about the blog and its host. Check your access logs and see if you can identify any activity to a particular IP – then block it. Write a post about the problem. Keep complaining to the host and mention the word splog. When Adsense ads appear, inform google and quote the Adsense publisher number. If you see any links from the site follow them and see where they go. Contact the other site being copied as well – what do they think?

If this is just republishing, then you have provided an RSS feed so probably not much you can do. But if this becomes a money-making splog, then I’d take action by complaining to google.

bohoblog –

hostname/address: bohodesigns.com
host type – auto detect or unix standard
User ID – the “logged in as” name from the top right hand corner of the control panel of the hosting manager for your domain
password – the password you use for that domain.

bohoblog – go get yourself WS_FTP or similar. Then try FTPing some text files up for practice. You will need your hosting ID and password. Learn the program! I have just upgraded my blog to 2.0.2 on GoDaddy and it didn’t take long.

Some interesting news from GoDaddy. They now have a new option on the Linux Configuration hosting control panel under “Add on Languages”. This alters the server configuration (Linux economy hosting). They say that CGI and PHP no longer run under SBOX but under suexec and suphp respectively. The new option is called “Upgrade to Hosting Configuration 2.0”. Godaddy claim that .htaccess should now see PHP files for blocking purposes based on IP address. There is one warning – the new hosting configuration disables “exec cmd” which is used for executing programs from server-side include-enabled pages. I’m not sure there are any instances of this in standard WordPress but perhaps there are some plug-ins that depend on it? Anybody out there care to enlighten me?

Hops- They do seem to bury stuff away don’t they..backing up (exporting) the MySQL database is also tedious. Did you get permalinks to work?

I’m having another go at GoDaddy over their not very well thought out SBOX policy…simple reconfiguration is needed. Who else here uses GoDaddy to host their blog? Any problems?

Godaddy definitely need to review their policy regarding SBOX and PHP rewrites if they want to be more WordPress friendly.

The developer of SBOX has since told me that he doesn’t know what risks GoDaddy are concerned about. They could easily enable PHP rewrites using his advice so that “deny from IP” works in .htaccess. Computerdude33 – they do support mod_rewrite (try rewriting one html file to another in .htaccess – it works) but not rewrites on PHP files. And that’s the problem for WordPress users. GoDaddy is apparently the largest single commercial user of SBOX so you’d have thought that they might have listened to its developer.

There is a new version of SBOX now along with a documented solution to the .htaccess problem I mentioned before. However, GoDaddy has no plans to make any configuration changes to its economy Linux hosting. PHP rewrites in .htaccess will not work until they do!