Daily Archives: October 31, 2016
A Rogue Plug-in . . .
I didn’t finally get Sunday’s blog posted until about 3:30 this afternoon due to a rogue plug-in in my WordPress setup.
The problem first appeared about 1am this morning when I finished the blog began to upload it. About 5 seconds into the procedure, I would get an error message that said ‘500 Internal Server Error’. Now I didn’t think much of this at time because I see it every now and then. But usually I just wait a little while, try it again, and it goes through with no more problems.
But not this time. I continued to try it about every 30 minutes until I headed back home at 5am, still with no luck.
Thinking maybe it was a laptop problem I tried it again from my desktop machine in the rig with no better results. So I went to bed. And that was it until I got up about 11:30.
At that point, though, the first thing I did was to check with the real estate office (the lady owns also owns the RV park) to see if our absentee ballots had come in. But no luck yet.
I spent the next hour or so trying to figure out what the baseline problem was. Finally, I decided to just use WP’s built-in editor to publish the blog. And after copying and pasting the blog text into the editor, I began to upload the photos into the Media folder so I could then paste them into the blog.
And that’s when the problem became obvious. When I tried to upload the photos, I immediately got a HTTP Error message. And got it over and over again, no matter whether it was GIF, JPG, or PNG, and no matter how large or small, I even tried to upload a 5 byte text file with no luck.
First things first, I logged into my Godaddy account to check the file permissions on the Images folder, It the permissions had somehow gotten changed to Read Only, then no new files, i.e photos could be written to the folder. But the permissions were fine.
So having reached the limit of what I could do from my end, I put in a call to Godaddy Tech Support . . . and was told there was a 37 minute wait. That’s what I get for calling in the middle of the day. Usually I’m calling at 2 in the morning and I get right through. But Godaddy has this neat feature where they take your phone number and then call you back when there’s a tech available.
When he did call back, he was immediately able to recreate the problem on his end, which is always a relief. I told him nothing had been changed or update in the last week or so. It was just working fine Saturday night and not working Sunday night.
So we went down the list, with Mark the tech guy trying different settings and then I would try to upload an image. He even temporarily changed out the Brava theme for another one. And nothing worked until he turned off all WP plug-ins. And then suddenly it worked. Now to figure out which of the 40 odd plug-ins was causing the problem. Lucky for us, the plug-ins are listed alphabetically and the rogue began with a ‘C’ – CAPTCHA for Login.
As soon as we turned that one off, everything worked again. But why was it causing the problem? The CAPTCHA is one of those plug-ins that makes you type in the letters from a distorted graphic. Like this.
It took some sleuthing, but we finally figured out what happened. Well, kind of.
Turns out the CAPTCHA plug-in pulls its graphics from the company’s website, and it looks like the company went out of business yesterday, and the website is gone. So we know what was causing the problem, but we never figured out why it was keeping photos from being uploaded to the Media folder.
But it’s fixed and I don’t care. But now I need to find a new CAPTCHA program, hopefully one that won’t shut down.
Originally tonight was supposed to be my last scheduled night of gate work, but just as I hung up with Godaddy, Todd texted me to let me know I’ll be working at this gate again tomorrow, Tuesday night. Said he didn’t know yet about Wed, or any further along.
So we’ll see.
Thought for the Day:
There is no government-created problem so large that more government can’t make it worse.
qerqewrqe
