Month: March 2007

And this morning’s lessons are…

  • If you’re about to start something dangerous (like an aptitude upgrade on your dom0), and you set up an at job to reboot it if it causes the box to lose network connectivity, don’t forget to atrm it if everything is fine afterwards.
  • reboot in an at job doesn’t do the right thing – my box was still responding to pings but I couldn’t get to it at all. Next time try shutdown -r now

OpenID is a go, it appears

Last night I had an idea. And typically for me, I couldn’t sleep properly as I kept trying to remind myself about the idea. I should have gotten up and tried it, but if it hadn’t worked I would have gotten even less sleep.

Anyway, the problem I was having with the OpenID plugin is that I forgot to make the plugin’s temp directory group writable. Most people seem to be ok with just making all their blog files writable by the web server, but I worry about the number of security holes that seem to pervade PHP applications so I make all the WordPress files belong to the user “blog” and only the ones that the web server has a legitimate reason to write belong to the group “www-data” and are group-write. When I installed this plugin, I made the tmp directory belong to the group “www-data”, but I forgot to “chmod g+rwx” on it. Duh. Even more “duh” worthy, I see that the plugin page has a FAQ that has that as item 1.

It seems to be working now. Let me know if you can’t comment.

No OpenID, I’m afraid

I tried to install this OpenID Comments for WordPress plugin. My luck with with WordPress plugins is about 50% success, and most of the ones that fail seem to be ones suggested by Jen. Or at least my biggest other failures have been with various plugins that attempted to embed my Gallery, and Jen seemed to have no trouble with hers. (I got it to the point where it was throwing off “duplicate primary key” errors, but no closer.)

This time, it looks like it would go off to LiveJournal, get successfully authenticated, but when it came back instead of putting the comment on the post it was posted to, it was putting it on the same non-existent blog URL as in the “-1 comments” debacle. The “-1 comments” thing was caused because LJXP was sending off the entry to LiveJournal before the comment number plugin knew what postid it was, but I hacked the code of both plugins and made it work. This time I looked for something obvious, but with no luck.

Maybe somebody can suggest an OpenID WordPress plugin that works?

Another attempt

I think this should do it. Famous last words. Last test got the correct comment one *and* the -1 comments thing. This should get rid of the “-1 comments”.

If this works, I’ll look into OpenID commenting (thanks for the suggestion, Jen) and I’ll strongly suggest everybody who has currently LiveJournal friended “ptomblin”, “ptomblin_rss” and “rantsnrevels” to unfriend them and friend “ptomblin_lj”.