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            <p>So I blogged the other day about <a href="cloudflare-and-wordpress-admin.html">adding SSL to the Wordpress admin area</a> for a site using the free version of Cloudfare. The solution that I adapted wasn't the perfect one - it leads to another issue - one of constant redirects. When you login to your admin area you are redirected to the wp-login.php page once again even though your login was successful.</p>
            <p>This is something that happens randomly and it's a silent failure. &nbsp;Wordpress does not display any error messages either in the browser or the error_log file. On the other hand if you manually type https://www.raditha.com/blog/wp-admin/ into your browser you find that it loads the dashboard - which implies that the login was successful. This strange behaviour can apparently be rectified by following the <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Administration_Over_SSL">Wordpress Administration over SSL guidelines</a></p>
            <p>Or so I thought, unfortunately it didn't quite work out that way. What did work was adding a line to the wp-config.php file as follows:</p>
            <p>define('ADMIN_COOKIE_PATH', '/');</p>
            <p>This solution I gathered from the <a href="http://www.str-graphics.com/index.html/wordpress-admin-login-loop-redirect-problem-solved/">STR Graphics blog</a></p>
            <p>There was yet another problem that needed to be fixed, though it was not quite related to the cloudflare move, it's something that's been around for a while but something I hadn't bothered to fix. The exact problem was the category pages were throwing up 404 errors in some cases (because advanced permalinks plugin wasn't handling them properly). The solution as described by <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/topic/advanced-permalinks-category-links-not-working">hartlrobert</a> is to comment out the line that filters category page links in the plugin code.</p>
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            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">"Market’s rapid slide threatens to make the month year's worst ever with Rs. 116 b wiped off in value already ASI 24 points short of sinking to 2011’s lowest level Analysts say institutional and retail investors need to be optimistic and return to market on a buying mood"</p>
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CSE is Heading in the Right Direction at Last

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            <p>I have a love hate relationship with <a href="https://mysql.com">MySQL</a>. I first discovered and fell in love with it around twelve years ago. I didn't mind that it didn't have stored procedures and sub queries. My first disappointment was when MySQL announced <a href="511.html">changes to their client license terms</a> around eight years back.</p>
            <p>&nbsp;</p>
            <p>Disillusionment occurred when MySQL was acquired by Oracle. Enough has been said about both issues that I don't need to add any more noise. What I should perhaps have done is to move away from MySQL completely, but even thought I have worked with Postgres and several noSQL databases (such as SimpleDB, Couch and Mongo) something always kept pulling me back.</p>
            <p>&nbsp;</p>
            <p>That of course brings me to the question <a href="http://www.percona.com">Percona</a>. Though I discovered it a while back the reason that I didn't adapt it is because it's a drop in replacement for mysql. I rediscovered it while looking around for a reliable mysql backup system. The 'official' solution, mysql enterprise backup costs USD 5,000 . That's a figure that I am not quite keen to dish out, specially when Percona xtrabackup is free and has more features (see a <a href="http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/intro.html">comparison</a>).</p>
            <p>&nbsp;</p>
            <p>Trying to install Percona didn't go too smoothly though.</p>
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Percona a Drop in Replacement for MySQL

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            <pre>#include &lt;stdio.h&gt;<p></p><p>main()</p><p>{</p><p>    printf("Goodbye, Dennis Ritchie");</p><p>}</p></pre>
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Goodbye

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            <p>After <a href="who-is-the-victim.html">suffering three site outages in as many days</a>, I decided to wring in a few changes. One of them being adapting <a href="https://cloudflare.com">Cloudflare</a>. Setting up Cloudflare is so rediculously easy, you don't even need to be a geek. It doesn't really speed up this site because Amazon AWS already is pretty quick. My intention in moving though was to reduce my dependence on it. After all there's no such thing as a 100% full proof service. The other advantage is that it helps to cut down on feedback form and comment spam.</p>
            <p>The only trouble with Cloudflare was encountered when testing wordpress admin. The following error shows up in the log file when blog admin area links are accessed. It looks like wordpress is trying to mix ssl and non ssl stuff and failing.</p>
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            <p></p>

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Cloudflare and Wordpress Admin

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            One of the residuals of the server outage is that the feedback form on this site stopped working even after restoration. That was caused by the ditching of the old CentOS (5.4) Amazon Machine Image in favour of a CentOS&nbsp; (5.6) AMI when the PHP mail funciton is invoked it results in the following error showing up in the &nbsp;Apache <em>main error log file</em>.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Program mode requires special privileges, e.g., root or TrustedUser.</span></p>
            That's right folks, instead of showing up in the site specific log file, it appears in the /var/log/httpd/error_log. I had seen it previously but disregarded it in my preoccupation with getting the site back on line. The error message does not include any other information and gives no hint whatsoever that it relates to the mail() function. It was when the feedback spam stopped flooding my mail box that I started looking around and made the connection. At first I was tempted to let pull the feedback form&nbsp;altogether&nbsp;but decided not to.

            &nbsp;

            Googling brought up many solutions that doesn't work including changing the permissi0ns on <em>/var/spool/clientmqueue</em> (it's already correct) to chaning SELinux settings (who in his right mind uses SELinux?) after much digging I learnt that you need to change the sendmail_path setting in the php.ini file. To be specific
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #003366;">sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i</span></p>
            Needs to be changed to
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #003366;">sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix -t -i</span></p>
            &nbsp;

            Good thing it was so easy. Since giving up on qmail long ago and switching to Google Apps, I have unlearnt everything that I knew about qmail and sendmail.

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Monthly Archives for 2011 10

And more wordpress and cloudflare issues

CSE is Heading in the Right Direction at Last

Percona a Drop in Replacement for MySQL

Goodbye

Cloudflare and Wordpress Admin

Program mode requires special privileges, e.g., root or TrustedUser.