Transition Technology: Ticket Query

#806: IIRS pre-beta usability issues

chris — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 21:30:27 GMT

Ticket to track usability issues etc.

#519: Fixing various URL in the Database

chris — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:47:21 GMT

This page:

http://transitionnetwork.org/support/what-transition-initiative

Contains this HTML:

<p><img alt="TransitionSantaCruz" src="http://transitionsc.org/sites/www.transitionnetwork.org/files/pixture_reloaded_logo.png" align="right" height="69" width="150"></p>

The image is a 404:

http://transitionsc.org/sites/www.transitionnetwork.org/files/pixture_reloaded_logo.png

The correct location for the image is:

http://transitionsc.org/sites/default/files/pixture_reloaded_logo.png

Looking at the Internet Archive this was correct back in October 2012,

http://web.archive.org/web/20121022030350/http://www.transitionnetwork.org/support/what-transition-initiative

Their munged HTML contains the correct URL:

<p><a href="/web/20121022030350/http://transitionsc.org/sites/default/files/pixture_reloaded_logo.png" class="colorbox initColorbox-processed cboxElement">

It appears to me that an edit must have been done on the database something like:

s;/sites/default/files/;/sites/www.transitionnetwork.org/files/;

There might well be other URLs to other Drupal sites that were changed when they shouldn't have been?

I have had a quick look at the database dump and couldn't find any examples of this problem, but there are 113 lines to check:

grep "sites/www.transitionnetwork.org/files" /var/backups/mysql/sqldump/transitionnetwor.sql | wc -l
113

I did notice that there are a lot of URLs in the database like this:

src=\"http://www.transitionnetwork.org/sites/www.transitionnetwork.org/files/uploaded/u5857/Map-TransitionNetworkOffice.jpg\"

And

src=\"https://www.transitionnetwork.org/sites/www.transitionnetwork.org/files/uploaded/u4/transition%20companion%20cover.jpg\"

Both the above links would be better starting with / or //www.transitionnetwork.org/ as this would avoid people getting HTTPS content when using HTTP and also getting HTTP content when using HTTPS.

I think it would be worth putting the site into maintenance mode, doing a dump of the database, checking these 113 lines for issues like those above, correcting them all and then reinserting the data, however this would need to be done at a suitable time.

I'd be happy to do this task. Ed, Jim, any thoughts about when would be a good time to do it?

#537: Parrot setup and documentation

chris — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:11:36 GMT

Things done setting up parrot.webarch.net -- a new virtual machine for running Wordpress sites, see wiki:ParrotServer

#540: HTTPS for WordPress sites

chris — Wed, 01 May 2013 20:20:32 GMT

Currently the wiki:WordPress sites have have the following SSL certificates:

https://www.intransitionmovie.com/ -- Gandi commercial certificate and dedicated IP address
https://www.reconomy.org/ -- CAcert non-commercial certificate and shared IP address (SNI)
https://www.earthinheritors.net/ -- CAcert non-commercial certificate and shared IP address (SNI)
https://parrot.transitionnetwork.org/ -- Gandi TN wild card cert and shared IP address (SNI)
https://parrot.webarch.net/ -- CAcert non-commercial certificate, this is the default site for clients without SNI support

None of the site are set to enforce HTTPS for logins, this should be done ASAP for intransitionmovie.com

I think we have several options going forward, the first 3 of this are the only viable ones though, IMHO:

SNI and Seperate Certs and Shared IP

Get a Gandi SSL cert for each site and rely on SNI rather than having a dedicated IP address for each site, this is the cheapest way to solve the problem, the certs are around £15 each.

The clients that don't work with SNI are listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Client_side

Multi-domain Cert and Shared IP

Get a Gandi SSL cert with all the domains in, this is a little more expensive than seperate certs (around £20 per site) but it means that all the clients that don't work with SNI will work. One issue with this is when adding new site is that a brand new cert would be needed as additional names can't be added to multi-domain certs during their lifetime, this could be worked around by getting a single domain cert to run to the end of the life of the multi domain cert (this would use SNI).

Seperate Certs and Dedicated IPs

Getting a cert per site and a dedicated IP per site, this would cost the most as each IP address costs around the same as each cert, (so about £30 per site). It also seems like a great waste to use up a IP per site when they are so scarce and when technical workarounds to this old problem like multi-domain certs and SNI are now available. I don't favour this option.

Non-commercial CAcert Cert

This is the cheapest, it's fine if people are able to install the http://cacert.org/ root certificate but this is something that non-technical people seem to find hard and they also don't understand the security warnings that they get when the cert isn't installed. This option is the one currently in use but it's far from ideal and one of the other options needs to be adopted before enforcing HTTPS logins is deployed. I don't favour this option.

#541: Documentation of the WordPress sites

chris — Wed, 01 May 2013 20:25:57 GMT

These pages have been created for the documentation of the wiki:WordPress sites running on wiki:PenguinServer:

So far they only have a listing on the plugins for each site.

Ideally they would document all the plugins, the theme and the steps that need to be taken to upgrade each site and also any other things that need documenting.

Laura is this something you might be able to help with? I'm happy doing some work on it but you know your way around these sites far better than anyone else.

#587: Puffin MySQL Tuning

chris — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 12:54:47 GMT

This ticket is to track the tuning we do to MySQL on PuffinServer.

See also previous comments on this issue:

#598: Redirect reconomyproject.org to reconomy.org

chris — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 12:16:56 GMT

Request from Shane:

I've noticed that the domain www.reconomyproject.org is still live and running. i.e. can surf around it. I think you set it up so that it would auto redirect to reconomy.org - not 100% sure about the technical spec behind how you did this but is it still working? I noticed this because a lot of the referrals on to our fb page our coming from reconomyproject.org rather than reconomy.org

#619: Upgrade WordPress sites to 3.9.1

chris — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 14:38:05 GMT

News regarding the WordPress versions released since the sites were upgraded to 3.6.1 on ticket:594

We should consider how best to upgrade the wiki:WordPress sites running on wiki:ParrotServer and then ensure that they are upgraded.

#645: APC Tuning on Parrot and Penguin

chris — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 10:52:31 GMT

As part of the upgrade from Squeeze to Wheezy, see ticket:535, Munin graphs for APC were added:

There is also more APC info here:

The documentation for the variables which can be set in /etc/php5/mods-available/apc.ini can be found here:

http://php.net/manual/en/apc.configuration.php

This monitoring is generating quite a high volume of warnings about fragmentation and purges and this ticket has been created to try to sort this issue out.

#675: Piwik Geolocation

chris — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 12:16:36 GMT

We have this warning in the Piwik admin interface:

Geolocation works, but you are not using one of the recommended providers. If you have to import log files or do something else that requires setting IP addresses, use the PECL GeoIP implementation (recommended) or the PHP GeoIP implementation.

We currently do Geolocation at a Nginx level, it is possible that it would now be better to switch to do it at a Piwik level, see the documentation here: http://piwik.org/docs/geo-locate/

#676: Alternative to Skype for TTech Meetings

chris — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 13:33:51 GMT

Jim has pointed out that:

Skype costs us 15-30 minutes of grinding pain every time we do this!

So what are the alternatives and what are our requirements?

#692: Debian Updates

chris — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 15:16:17 GMT

This is a ticket to track debian upgrades to the wiki:PuffinServer, wiki:PenguinServer and wiki:ParrotServer the time they take.

See:

These updates are generally done using the wiki:AptitudeUpdateScript and this records all the changes in the /root/Changelog and then the contents of the Changelog are pasted into the ticket to document the upgrade.

This ticket took over from ticket:218 on 2014-02-25.

#716: Heartbleed

chris — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 08:53:58 GMT

Following on from ticket:692#comment:18 we should undertake the steps Drupal have taken: https://drupal.org/news/2014-04-08-security-update

#750: Annual update of SSL cert fingerprint for incomming emails to Trac

chris — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 13:42:42 GMT

Laura said she had replied to Trac email today but they didn't get through.

The issues has come up before, see wiki:TransitionTrac#Fetchmail

#763: Server Backups

chris — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 17:09:21 GMT

Two weeks ago annesley asked:

what off-site data storage, file backup and quick setup do we have?

I answered:

The 3 virtual servers have their file system mounted off a BSD/NFS/ZFS file server and the whole file system is backed up and stored onto another BSD/ZFS server in the same data centre. We did have backups also being copied to a server in Manchester but this is currently off-line as the Manchester server needs a disk swapping and rebuilding as a BSD/ZFS server.

A problem with this is that it's only me and Alan that have access to these backups, so I'd like to suggest I set up a new account for backups on our backup server and sort out cron jobs to rsync data to this account and document how people can access these backups.

The result would be that everybody would have SFTP access to 60 days worth of snapshots of backups from all three servers whenever needed without any need for my or Alan's intervention.

I expect this would take abount an hour to set up and another hour to document and help people understand it.

There would be no additional cost to the TN because backup space is already paid for.

#768: Piwik Archive Cron Error

chris — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 17:14:59 GMT

Have been getting these emails from PiwikServer:

From: root@penguin.webarch.net (Cron Daemon)
Date: Fri,  1 Aug 2014 14:06:48 +0100 (BST)
To: root@localhost
Subject: Cron <www-data@penguin> /web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/console core:archive --url=http://stats.transitionnetwork.org/ > /var/log/piwik-archive.log
ERROR CoreConsole[2014-08-01 13:05:18] [3e5ac] Got invalid response from API request:
+http://stats.transitionnetwork.org/index.php?module=API&method=API.get&idSite=1&period=week&date=last2&format=php&token_auth=XXXXXXXXXXXX&trigger=archivephp. Response was ' <div style='word-wrap: break-word; border: 3px solid red; padding:4px; width:70%;
+background-color:#FFFF96;'>         <strong>There is an error. Please report the message (Piwik 2.4.1)         and full backtrace in the <a
+href='?module=Proxy&action=redirect&url=http://forum.piwik.org' target='_blank'>Piwik forums</a> (please do a Search first as it might have
+been reported already!).<br /><br/>         Warning:</strong>
+<em>file_get_contents(http://api.piwik.org/1.0/getLatestVersion/?piwik_version=2.4.1&php_version=5.4.4-14%2Bdeb7u12&url=https%3A%2F%2Fstats.
+transitionnetwork.org%2Fweb%2Fstats.transitionnetwork.org%2Fpiwik%2Fconsole&trigger=API&timezone=Europe%2FLondon): failed to open stream:
+HTTP requ
 est fail
 ed! </em> in <strong>/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/core/Http.php</strong> on line <strong>406</strong> <br /><br />Backtrace
+--&gt;<div style="font-family:Courier;font-size:10pt"><br /> #0  Piwik\Error::errorHandler(...) called at [:]<br /> #1
+file_get_contents(...) called at [/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/core/Http.php:406]<br /> #2  Piwik\Http::sendHttpRequestBy(...)
+called at [/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/core/Http.php:94]<br /> #3  Piwik\Http::sendHttpRequest(...) called at
+[/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/core/UpdateCheck.php:72]<br /> #4  Piwik\UpdateCheck::check(...) called at
+[/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/plugins/CoreUpdater/CoreUpdater.php:142]<br /> #5
+Piwik\Plugins\CoreUpdater\CoreUpdater->updateCheck(...) called at [:]<br /> #6  call_user_func_array(...) called at
+[/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/core/EventDispatcher.php:98]<br /> #7  Piwik\EventDispatcher->postEvent(...) called at
+[/web/stats.transitionnetwor
 k.org/pi
 wik/core/Piwik.php:766]<br /> #8  Piwik\Piwik::postEvent(...) called at
+[/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/core/FrontController.php:391]<br /> #9  Piwik\FrontController->init(...) called at
+[/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/core/dispatch.php:33]<br /> #10  require_once(...) called at
+[/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/index.php:47]<br /> #11  require_once(...) called at
+[/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/core/CliMulti/RequestCommand.php:53]<br /> #12  Piwik\CliMulti\RequestCommand->execute(...) called
+at [/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Console/Command/Command.php:252]<br /> #13
+Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command->run(...) called at
+[/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Console/Application.php:887]<br /> #14
+Symfony\Component\Console\Application->doRunCommand(...) called at
+[/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Co
 nsole/Ap
 plication.php:193]<br /> #15  Symfony\Component\Console\Application->doRun(...) called at
+[/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/core/Console.php:64]<br /> #16  Piwik\Console->doRun(...) called at
+[/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Console/Application.php:124]<br /> #17
+Symfony\Component\Console\Application->run(...) called at [/web/stats.transitionnetwork.org/piwik/console:31]<br /> </div><br />
+</pre></div><br />  <div style='word-wrap: break-word; border: 3px solid red; padding:4px; width:70%; background-color:#FFFF96;'>
+<strong>There is an error. Please report the message (Piwik 2.4.1)         and full backtrace in the <a
+href='?module=Proxy&action=redirect&url=http://forum.piwik.org' target='_blank'>Piwik forums</a> (please do a Search first as it might have
+been reported already!).<br /><br/>         Warning:</strong>
+<em>file_get_contents(http://api.piwik.org/1.0/getLatestVersion/?piwik_version=2.4.1&php_version
 =5.4.4-1

#790: Annesley locked out of puffin

chris — Tue, 23 Sep 2014 14:05:18 GMT

Email from lfd:

Time:     Tue Sep 23 13:47:01 2014 +0100
IP:       XX.XX.XX.XX (HU/Hungary/XXXXXX.catv.pool.telekom.hu)
Failures: 5 (sshd)
Interval: 300 seconds
Blocked:  Permanent Block
Log entries:
Sep 23 13:46:28 puffin sshd[6056]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=XX.XX.XX.XX  user=tn.ftp
Sep 23 13:46:30 puffin sshd[6056]: Failed password for tn.ftp from XX.XX.XX.XX port 54327 ssh2
Sep 23 13:46:33 puffin sshd[6056]: Failed password for tn.ftp from XX.XX.XX.XX port 54327 ssh2
Sep 23 13:46:56 puffin sshd[6409]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=XX.XX.XX.XX  user=anewholm
Sep 23 13:46:58 puffin sshd[6409]: Failed password for anewholm from XX.XX.XX.XX port 54328 ssh2

#808: WordPress email being rejected due to From field

chris — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 19:28:23 GMT

This issues is like ticket:737 but with WordPress rather than Drupal causing the problem.

Laura has forwarded one of the returned emails which contains:

host aspmx.l.google.com [173.194.67.26]: 550-5.7.1 Unauthenticated email from yahoo.com is not accepted due to domain's 550-5.7.1 DMARC policy. Please contact administrator of yahoo.com domain if 550-5.7.1 this was a legitimate mail. Please visit 550-5.7.1 http://support.google.com/mail/answer/2451690 to learn about DMARC

#812: space.transitionnetwork.org hacked?

chris — Thu, 27 Nov 2014 11:09:32 GMT

BOA email from PuffinServer:

Hello,
Our system detected that the site space.transitionnetwork.org has been hacked!
Common signatures of an attack which triggered this alert:
You are required to change your password immediately (password aged)
su: Authentication token is no longer valid; new one required
(Ignored)
Site tested positive for known Drupalgeddon exploit checks               [error]
Update module is disabled and Drupalgeddon cannot check for Drupal       [error]
Security Updates. Please check for a security update manually.
You are running Drupal 7.31
https://www.drupal.org/node/3060/release?api_version%5B%5D=103
The platform root directory for this site is:
  /data/disk/tn/distro/008/openatrium-7.x-2.19-7.31.1
The system hostname is:
  puffin.webarch.net
To learn more on what happened, how it was possible and
how to survive #Drupageddon, please read:
  https://omega8.cc/drupageddon-psa-2014-003-342
--
This e-mail has been sent by your Aegir system monitor.

#814: Higher that usual loads on PuffinServer since early September

chris — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 17:12:35 GMT

The following load graph from PuffinServer shows that the load increased substantially in early September 2014, does anyone know why?

When I found I went to Drupal 7.33 and all I got was a slow site I thought that perhaps a Drupal 7 site on the server could be the cause but 7.33 came out on 7th November 2014.

Anyone have any ideas?

#819: Trac anti-spam measures

chris — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 10:28:01 GMT

Today we had our first item of Trac spam, ticket:818, since the open email interface was enabled almost 2 years ago on ticket:494.

This ticket has been created to investigate and implement some anti-spam measures.

#824: Analysis of the 2014 maintenance ticket time

chris — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 15:48:14 GMT

Ed has ask that I spend up to 2 hours on an analysis of the 2014 maintenance ticket time for our meeting tomorrow in Bristol.

#847: Upgrade Servers to Debian Jessie

chris — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 09:30:11 GMT

The latest version of Debian, Jessie, 8.0, came out over the weekend, we should consider upgrading the three servers, PuffinServer, PenguinServer and ParrotServer and what issues would arrise when we do.

See the documentation on Upgrades from Debian 7 (wheezy) and Issues to be aware of for jessie, specifically:

#851: Bot attacks on Transition Culture

chris — Sun, 10 May 2015 11:12:12 GMT

Yesterday there was a load spike on ParrotServer caused by a bot doing thousands of POSTs to xmlrpc.php.

#870: MediaWiki 1.23.10

chris — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 12:18:48 GMT

The announcement contains:

Bug Fixes in 1.23.10

(bug 67644) Make AutoLoaderTest handle namespaces
(T91653) Minimal PSR-3 debug logger to support backports from 1.25+.
(T102562) Fix InstantCommons parameters to handle the new HTTPS-only policy of Wikimedia Commons.

#871: Brute Force Attacks Against WordPress Sites

chris — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 13:41:26 GMT

Today there have been 53,932 attempts to login to the TTT web site on ParrotServer all from the same IP address:

grep POST /home/ttt/logs/access.log | grep wp-login.php | grep 217.174.240.254 | wc -l
53932

I noticed this due the higher than usual load it was generating.

Would it be OK to spend an hour or two installing the WP fail2ban plugin on all the sites on the server?

Some more background on this issue:

https://docs.webarch.net/wiki/WordPress#Brute_Force_Attacks

#875: Free HTTPS certificates from Let's Encrypt

chris — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 10:48:11 GMT

From mid November 2015 Let's Encrypt should be live, providing free SSL/TLS certificates. Currently the TN pays for a Gandi wild card cert, costing £130.50 a year, in addition most the WordPress sites on ParrotServer don't have certs due to the cost, see ticket:540.

The Let's Encrypt code is designed to be set up to run automatically -- certs are only valid for 90 days and the automatic renewal process runs when the cert is 60 days old.

We should consider if we want to use Let's Encrypt and what things would need to be put in place to use it, the wild card cert is due to expire on 22/01/16.

PuffinServer -- are we still going to be running PuffinServer in January 2016? Is there any chance that we might be able to consider the suggestions in ticket:754#comment:61? I'm not sure if I want to spend time trying to get Let's Encrypt working with a old version of BOA, up to date versions of BOA might support it out of the box.
PenguinServer -- this site hosts a lot of sites, see the listing, automating Let's Encrypt would probably be a hour or two of work, it might makes sense to upgrade it to Debian Jessie at the same time.
ParrotServer -- I suggest we rebuild this server from scratch, this would enable it to have the latest version of the Webarch Secure Hosting scripts and this include support for fail2ban for WordPress and phpMyAdmin, thus solving ticket:871 and includes automatic provisioning of Let's Encrypt certs for sites.

What do people think?

#879: MediaWiki 1.23.11

chris — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 08:42:45 GMT

Email on the announcements list:

Tomorrow we will be issuing a security release to all supported
branches of MediaWiki.
The new releases will be:
1.25.3
1.24.4
1.23.11
Fixes will be available in these respective release branches, the
unreleased 1.26.x branch, and master. Tarballs will be available
for the above mentioned point releases as well.
This security release will encompass core only, no bundled extensions
are affected.

#881: Site on ParrotServer with a memory leak?

chris — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 11:19:04 GMT

It appears a site, or application, on ParrotServer might have a memory leak.

#892: MediWiki Security Release: 1.26.1, 1.25.4, 1.24.5 and 1.23.12

chris — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 10:46:18 GMT

Email to the announcements list:

I would like to announce the release of MediaWiki 1.26.1, 1.25.4, 1.24.5,
and
1.23.12.
These releases fix five security issues in core, in addition to other bug
fixes. Download links are given at the end of this email
== Security fixes ==
(T117899) SECURITY: $wgArticlePath can no longer be set to relative paths
that
do not begin with a slash. This enabled trivial XSS attacks. Configuration
values such as "http://my.wiki.com/wiki/$1" are fine, as are "/wiki/$1". A
value such as "$1" or "wiki/$1" is not and will now throw an error
(T119309) SECURITY: Use hash_compare() for edit token comparison
(T118032) SECURITY: Don't allow cURL to interpret POST parameters starting
with
'@' as file uploads
(T115522) SECURITY: Passwords generated by User::randomPassword() can no
longer
be shorter than $wgMinimalPasswordLength
(T97897) SECURITY: Improve IP parsing and trimming. Previous behavior could
result in improper blocks being issued
(T109724) SECURITY: Special:MyPage, Special:MyTalk, Special:MyContributions
and
related pages no longer use HTTP redirects and are now redirected by
MediaWiki
== Note about EOL of 1.24.x ==
Please note that 1.24.5 marks the end of support for the 1.24.x series of
releases. Technically this ended a few weeks ago with the release of 1.26.0
but
we dropped one final release of 1.24.x here to give it a nicer send off for
those who have not yet upgraded.
== Release notes ==
Full release notes for 1.26.1:
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.26>
Full release notes for 1.25.4:
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.25>
Full release notes for 1.24.5:
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.24>
Full release notes for 1.23.12:
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.23>
For information about how to upgrade, see
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading>

#893: BOA Cron Jobs

chris — Thu, 24 Dec 2015 11:39:51 GMT

All the BOA cron jobs were stopped on ticket:846#comment:88. This ticket is for looking at them all and deciding which, if any, are needed.

#894: Brute Force Attacks Against WordPress XMLRPC

chris — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 11:23:51 GMT

For a few months I have see a lot of requests going to WordPress /xmlrpc.php and wasn't sure why, now it is clear:

Instead of going against wp-login.php (which can be easily blocked or protected via .htaccess) or doing a single attempt against xmlrpc, attackers are leveraging the system.multicall method to attempt to guess hundreds of passwords within just one HTTP request.

https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/10/brute-force-amplification-attacks-against-wordpress-xmlrpc.html

I'd like to install Stop XML-RPC Attack on all the WordPress site we host, unless anyone has a good reason not to. This plugin simply whitelists the JetPack/Automattic's subnets and blocks all other access to /xmlrpc.php.

I started tracking the abuse a while ago and you can see it and manually address it on ParrotServer like this:

sudo -i
wp-xmlrpc-abuse
IP addresses accessing xmlrpc.php more than twice for the last 1000 lines of each access.log:
      2 46.148.XX.XX
    733 195.62.53.243
    177 195.62.53.243
      2 66.76.XX.XX
dig -x 195.62.53.243 +short
  53-243.static.spheral.ru.
ipdrop 195.62.53.243

But we need to be more pro-active in blocking access or we are going to probably see some compromised sites.

#897: Hosting information/requirements for 2016

chris — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 10:14:57 GMT

This is a ticket to track the time spent on an email thread with Ade.

#901: Enable SSH access to PuffinServer for Ade

chris — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 13:25:27 GMT

This is a ticket to track the time spent sorting out SSH access for Ade to PuffinServer.

#903: Large load spike on PuffinServer

chris — Mon, 08 Feb 2016 08:46:37 GMT

There was a large load spike this morning on PuffinServer, which appears to have been caused by 12k requests for pages (Nginx doesn't log requests for anything other than PHP generated pages) from one IP address, this IP address has been blocked and I'll post some details below.

#904: Issues to consider in the migration from Drupal to WordPress

chris — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 10:41:04 GMT

A few weeks ago Ade said he though it would be worth me opening a ticket to use to flag up some issues to be considered in the migration of the Transition Network site from Drupal 6 to WordPress.

#905: TN site down due to redis not running

chris — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 10:28:40 GMT

I'm working on this...

#907: TN Drupal database size

chris — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 10:20:10 GMT

6 weeks ago the datadase dump was 447M, see trac:ticket/896#comment:3 but now it is 1.8G:

ls -lah /var/backups/mysql/sqldump/transitionnetw_0.sql
-rw------- 1 root root 1.8G Mar  2 01:23 /var/backups/mysql/sqldump/transitionnetw_0.sql

Anyone have any idea what happened to cause this? Are we keeping too many log entries?

#912: Stats for TTT

chris — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 10:29:02 GMT

Nicola at TTT has asked:

Could you let me know the size of the TTT and Transition Streets sites please? I have Google Analytics for TTT but not for Transition Streets, and I wonder if you could also tell me how many visitors it gets annually?

#919: Site offline

chris — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 18:17:26 GMT

The https://www.transitionnetwork.org/ site has been "off-line" since about 7pm, I see that Paul is logged on via ssh -- is this something that we should worry about or is this intentional?

#924: Sheffield Server Shutdown Timetable?

chris — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 08:46:27 GMT

Since www.transitionnetwork.org is now running on dedi2835.your-server.de there seems little point in the Transition Network continuing to pay for the PuffinServer and my time doing sysadmin updates on it?

If the Transition Network would like Webarchitects to shutdown and delete this server and all it's backups could you please let me know when you would like it doing?

I guess the same goes for PenguinServer and ParrotServer, though these servers still have live sites on them, including this Trac site that I use to keep track of time worked -- when PenguinServer is shutdown I will no longer have a public place to document the time I work for the Transition Network and all the server and site documentation from the last six years will be lost.

#925: Piwik 2.16.3

chris — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 10:25:36 GMT

The Changelog contains:

Security release

This release is rated critical.

The Piwik security engineering team has internally identified a critical security issue and has fixed it in Piwik 2.16.3. We recommend all users to upgrade to this latest version.

Database upgrade

Note: This release contains major database upgrades and upgrading your database will take a long time if you have a lot of data in your database.

Please make sure you read the Update Piwik guide for high traffic instances.

#719: Transition Culture HTML Problems

chris — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 20:07:09 GMT

If you look at old Transition Culture articles they had hyperlinks and blockquotes, for example:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070228081440/http://transitionculture.org/2006/01/24/local-energy-local-currency-local-power/

If you look at the version we now have this formatting has been lost and the first paragraph is a mess:

http://transitionculture.org/2006/01/24/local-energy-local-currency-local-power/

The formatting wasn't lost when the new TC design was first deployed:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080429205320/http://transitionculture.org/2006/01/24/local-energy-local-currency-local-power/

It has happened since then.

We should consider investigating what caused the problems and how they can be fixed?

This might be a task that Simon would be best placed to undertake?

#731: Meetings in maintenance

chris — Fri, 23 May 2014 10:47:39 GMT

Ticket to record time spent on Skype call on 22nd May 2014.

#747: Accessibility / archiving of podcasts

chris — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 10:39:14 GMT

Would it be possible to consider making podcasts available as MP3's via RSS feeds? This would enable applications such as AntennaPod to play the podcasts.

Currently podcasts such as this one:

https://www.transitionnetwork.org/blogs/rob-hopkins/2014-06/alan-simpson-transition-has-enormous-strength-moment

Appear to only be available via the Soundcloud web interface?

https://soundcloud.com/transition-culture/alan-simpson-on-growth-renewables-and-transition

There might be Soundcloud settings to enable MP3 downloads and / or RSS feeds?

In addition having a copies available / archived on a non-corporate site, eg a *.transitionnetwork.org site and / or archive.org would be a good addition?

Sorry if this isn't the right place to raise this, I did consider posting it as a comment on Robs blog but thought that would be even less appropriate.

#520: Session 443 config in settings.php

chris — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 23:16:49 GMT

There is this warning displaying at https://www.transitionnetwork.org/admin/reports/status

Settings.php is not setup correctly. With the current configuration of 443 Session module, the following lines must be in settings.php.
      if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && $_SERVER['HTTPS'] != 'off') {
        ini_set('session.cookie_secure', 1);
      }

Based on the check of what is happening with cookies done on ticket:371#comment:34 and ticket:371#comment:36 things are currently working OK, session cookies do have the secure flag set, so I'm a bit confused by this warning message. I also think that the PHP suggested to add to settings.php looks perfectly sensible and should be included, I'm sure we did have it on the old server, however there are 33 settings.php files on wiki:PuffinServer and I'm not clear which one the live site uses.

#521: MySQL Unsafe statement warnings in the daemon.log

chris — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 09:46:57 GMT

I don't know if these matter?

I found them when hunting for 502 errors.

grep "Unsafe statement written to the binary log" /var/log/daemon.log | wc -l
343

Some examples:

Mar 16 09:28:20 puffin mysqld: 130316  9:28:20 [Warning] Unsafe statement written to the binary log using statement format since BINLOG_FORMAT = STATEMENT. Statements writing to a table with an auto-increment column after selecting from another table are unsafe because the order in which rows are retrieved determines what (if any) rows will be written. This order cannot be predicted and may differ on master and the slave. Statement: DELETE FROM notifications_event WHERE created < 1363426040 AND eid < (SELECT MIN(eid) FROM notifications_queue)

Mar 16 05:52:12 puffin mysqld: 130316  5:52:12 [Warning] Unsafe statement written to the binary log using statement format since BINLOG_FORMAT = STATEMENT. Statements writing to a table with an auto-increment column after selecting from another table are unsafe because the order in which rows are retrieved determines what (if any) rows will be written. This order cannot be predicted and may differ on master and the slave. Statement: INSERT INTO notifications_queue (uid, mdid, send_method, sid, module, eid, send_interval, language, cron, created, conditions) SELECT DISTINCT s.uid, s.mdid, s.send_method, s.sid, s.module, 61233, s.send_interval, s.language, s.cron, 1363413132, s.conditions FROM notifications s LEFT JOIN notifications_fields f ON s.sid = f.sid WHERE (s.status = 1) AND (s.event_type = 'node') AND (s.send_interval >= 0) AND ((f.field = 'nid' AND f.intval = 30718) OR (f.field = 'type' AND f.value = 'profile') OR (f.field = 'author' AND f.intval = 16908)) GROUP BY s.uid, s.mdid, s.send_method, s.sid, s.module, s.send_interval, s.

#714: Drop down menu useability on devices with touch screens

chris — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 09:21:46 GMT

The main menu bar across the top of the Transition Network site has a drop down navigation menu which appears to only be usable with Firefox on Android if a mouse is attached -- without a mouse it's not possible to select items from the drop down menu. I would guess that this is because something like onMouseOver isn't available in situations like this?