Here are Rob's Blog entries for January 2008.
Blog entries for other months can be found in the main blog index.
More late night server maintainence...
I noticed the /tmp drive on my server was very full, so had a quick peek. It was full of large CGItemp files.
It turns out the files I'm accepting using for upload using CGI.pm aren't deleted automatically from the temporary directory as the documentation suggests.
When you're dealing with a lot of large uploads, this can be a problem.
I've just spent an hour ripping out (what's left) of my hair after upgrading the php4 facebook client to retro fit in some profile_setFBML changes for Kerrang.
It turns out there is a slight bug in the current facebookapi_php4_restlib.php on line 274.
It seems the developers got lazy and just cut and pasted in some php5 code, thus giving me a nasty compiler error.
The solution is just to remove the "public" from around the data_getCookies and data_setCookie functions.
The trackback spammers are getting clever it seems. Tonight 5 spams got through for the first time in months.
My antispam system visits the URL submitted on the site to see if they link back to me. If they do, they are probably genuine so get let through. If they don't they are flagged as suspicious and if an IP address is flagged more than 3 times anything from there is classed as spam.
The spammers have actually done something quite clever. When I request the page to check, they detect my IP address and they match it to any domain they have in their database and append the domain name as dummy links under the closing html </html> tag. So when I try to check from the server hosting robertprice.co.uk it appends robertprice.co.uk links to the page, when I check from another, it gives the real page minus the links.
The new solution is to detect these bogus links as they are invalid html and treat them as spam.
Ideally I should be using something like Akismet, but that's not as much fun. :-)