General IT

Installing Viber 32 bit on Linux, under wine.

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I've seen a few posts about doing this, which should be a relatively simple matter. Install wine, download the Viber installer, and then run 'wine ViberSetup.exe' from a command prompt. And it should be that simple. Except it wasn't in my case, and none of the guides acknowledged any issues. So here, for the internet … Read more

WordPress Multi Site (WPMU) close all old posts script.

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I'd previously closed all comments on posts over 30 days old, across all 700 blogs on the installation, so I was dismayed to be getting comment spam still. How was it sneaking in? After looking through my logs for POST comments I pulled out a bunch of likely looking pages.

grep wp-comments-post access.log

OK so it seemed that although all the WP Posts were locked down, some Pages and some Media posts were still not locked down — the 30 day expiry thing must only apply to Posts. Grrr. The internet revealed no easy way to fix this so I looked in the database and crafted a query which would do this for me on one table …

UPDATE `wp_1_posts` SET `comment_status` = "closed", `ping_status` = "closed" WHERE `post_modified` < "2013-10-31 11:59:59"

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WordPress Multisite Blog Mass Removal Script

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I was moving a WPMU site to a new server and saw that the database had grown to about 250Mb, and there were about 700 blogs running on the server. I used a few database queries to pull out a list of which blogs I wanted to delete — basically any which had a creation date and last update date the same, and any with only one post etc — at which point I had a list of 300 blog IDs. So was I going to manually delete them all? Nope, I did what any sensible person did, and wrote a script to do it.

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vnstat for webservers

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This is quickly becoming one of my favourite tools when setting up webservers, after discovering it recently. I have all sorts of monitoring set up and use munin a lot, but vnstat seems to be a very lightweight daemon which gives you insight into the traffic to and from your box. Best of all it integrates well with logwatch, so it will send you a quick report every day so you can see immediately if something is going wrong.

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Power Mutt usage.

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I always install mutt when I'm setting up a server, mainly because I use it to send myself files from the command line, for local examination or archiving. Its quicker than using scp, ssh, or (heaven forbid) ftp. Plus you can use it in shell scripts. For example; But recently I was troubleshooting a server … Read more