There's an ongoing brute-force attack against WordPress and Joomla sites. The attack tries to brute-force the admin password. (Reddit) I had to harden my WordPress some time ago. Here are the guides I followed when hardening my installation: My WordPress Site Was Hacked Hardening WordPress Ultimate Security Checker plugin (guide) Additional steps I've taken today: … Continue reading Hardening WordPress against the ongoing brute-force attack
Category: Web applications
Migrating from Google Reader to Fever
The perfidious vandals at Google will kill Google Reader on July 1, 2013. Accordingly, it is time to wean ourselves off Google dependence and find an alternative. Perhaps this will prove to be a good thing, as Google Reader has strangled RSS innovation through its monopolist, good-enough position much like IE6 once strangled the web. … Continue reading Migrating from Google Reader to Fever
Userscript for faster deletion of MediaWiki spam
A couple weeks ago I posted a userscript that makes banning MediaWiki spammers easier by setting good defaults for the user ban form. Since then, I've had to ban a lot of spammers, so I thought I should remove another point of friction. For some reason, MediaWiki chooses to not provide direct deletion links on … Continue reading Userscript for faster deletion of MediaWiki spam
Userscript to make banning MediaWiki spammers easier
Somehow, I've come to be responsible for administering two MediaWiki-powered wikis. The main burden is having to ban spammers, which sometimes sign up in batches of 20 at a time. To help with process, I've put together the following browser userscript. On Firefox, you can easily set it up using the Greasemonkey extension. Opera and … Continue reading Userscript to make banning MediaWiki spammers easier
Looking for help with DB2 support in MediaWiki
MediaWiki is the PHP application underlying Wikipedia and other sites. Over the past couple years, I've spent some of my spare time to add DB2 support to it. Here's where things stand now: Working: Installing on DB2 using the old installer Broken: Creating and editing articles Not implemented: Search Not implemented: Installing on DB2 using … Continue reading Looking for help with DB2 support in MediaWiki
MediaWiki with DB2 support 1.16alpha
MediaWiki 1.15 was released with partial DB2 support, but unfortunately there were some changes to the database schema that I missed and it didn't work out of the box. Since then, I've committed several fixes to the main development trunk. The trunk is currently destined to become 1.16alpha, though theoretically I could backport these to … Continue reading MediaWiki with DB2 support 1.16alpha
Continuing MediaWiki development
No fresh download quite yet, but I just made a large commit to the MediaWiki source of the last week's work. This is going in the trunk -- aka MediaWiki 1.16alpha. There are a few bugs I hope to catch this weekend, at which point I'll put up a fresh archive of working code. config/index.php: … Continue reading Continuing MediaWiki development
IBM DB2 patch for MediaWIki
MediaWiki is the software that powers sites like Wikipedia, Ubuntu Help Wiki, and many others. In my spare time, I've written a patch to add IBM DB2 support to the development trunk. Hopefully, it will be added to the official source soon. In the meantime: add_ibm_db2.diff -- changes to existing files against r43499 of the … Continue reading IBM DB2 patch for MediaWIki
Make tickets by milestone useful in trac
Trac is a great bug tracking, work ticket, action item management environment. It integrates well with SVN and other source control repositories. Its Roadmap view conveniently order milestones by due date. However, the custom report queries it comes with order milestones by their name. Frankly, that's much less useful. I understand that they are replacing … Continue reading Make tickets by milestone useful in trac
Repair table failed. Please run repair table.
One of the tables of my MediaWiki installation crashed. When I tried to repair it, I got this less-than-helpful error message. So did the mysqlcheck utility when I SSHed to the server. However, the command has extra options that can be used to repair high levels of corruptions, such as when the MYI is missing. … Continue reading Repair table failed. Please run repair table.
Leo on Tech 