WordPress and MySQL on OpenSolaris

 Technology  No Responses »
Feb 022009
 

The next step in the list for mov­ing my minor web­sites to OpenSol­ar­is (see the first post for the motiv­a­tion) was to set up MySQL. After I down­loaded the OpenSol­ar­is Web Stack pack­age, MySQL was installed and run­ning, so it was more a mat­ter of tweak­ing. Little things like copy­ing the /etc/mysql/5.0/my-huge.cnf to /etc/mysql/my.cnf so that the default con­fig­ur­a­tion takes advant­age of the 2 GB of RAM, for example. 

I’ve heard con­flict­ing things about wheth­er one needs a root pass­word for MySQL, giv­en that it uses the Unix root iden­tity by default. After my years in secur­ity and iden­tity I decided to set one any­way, as recom­men­ded by the MySQL post-install­a­tion setup doc­u­ment­a­tion, even if it would be hard for any­one to get into the machine to do any dam­age, since it will be behind a firewall/router.

The next step was to move the Word­Press-based sites. I decided to try the export/import facil­it­ies in Word­Press, since I haven’t tried those out before, and it meant being able to use a new MySQL data­base with no cruft in it. I set up new users for the spe­cif­ic data­bases, copied the files across with rsync, impor­ted the XML file, and voila! It all worked out pretty well, although reset­ting the vari­ous con­fig­ur­a­tion options in Word­Press took a few minutes.

Minor WordPress Plugin Problems

 WordPress  No Responses »
Mar 102008
 

I real­ized while installing the latest Word­Press upgrade, that I had­n’t yet blogged some solu­tions to issues I had some time ago. These are all issues related to plugins. 

Prob­lem 1: I installed the Organ­izer plu­gin to help organ­ise my pic­tures. It would­n’t show them, which some­what defeats the pur­pose of an organ­izer. Look­ing at the errors with Fire­bug (one of the most use­ful Fire­fox exten­sions I’ve found) revealed that the organizer_jump_directory func­tion was­n’t defined. One of the com­ments on the plu­gin solved the prob­lem: copy the con­tents of the general.js file to the index.php and view.php files.

Prob­lem 2: flex­ible upload seemed to be activ­ated, but I could­n’t see any sign of it in the “Write” page. The “add field” box was miss­ing from the upload part of the page, as well as the oth­er use­ful items. The solu­tion: I needed to turn off the mod_security Apache mod­ule for the admin dir­ect­ory in the .htac­cess file. There are more details in Word­Press sup­port for­um. I also needed to chmod the plu­gins dir­ect­ory to 755.

Prob­lem 3: I have anoth­er blog, and wanted to show the post­ings from this blog via the Atom feed. I set it up, and it seemed to work, but it nev­er updated the list to show the latest post­ings. After try­ing out a lot of dif­fer­ent ideas, I dis­covered in the serv­er logs that I had a 403: Forbidden error, which gave me a new and dif­fer­ent set of things to try out. In the end I dis­covered the source was that the Bad­Be­ha­vi­or plu­gin was block­ing the requests. So I added the IP address of my blog into the bad-behavior/whitelist.inc.php file, and all now works as it should.

/* ]]> */