I’ll be out of town for the next three days. Unfortunately the BBS has been getting hammered 24/7 by asian hackers for the last month. Nothing that’s an issue other than bandwidth but it is causing my machine to overheat and shut down every couple of days. If you can’t login, or deliver Fido mail that’s what the problem is and it will be down until Sunday night.
I’ll be doing a preliminary update on using MQTT with Homeseer once I get back in town, as well as hooking up Apple Homekit.
I mentioned down below (back in March) that I thought the comments were fixed. Apparently not. Someone contacted me about not being able to post a comment a few days ago and I have been troubleshooting it all week. I finally contacted @Livingdot tech support last night and that (like quite a bit of tech support) was half-assed and hit and miss.
Sent and received 20+ emails since last night that went along the lines of:
“such and such is the problem”
“ok, it’s fixed now” and they close the ticket.
I check and it’s not fixed so reopen the ticket and email them back
“no, it’s not fixed”
This went on five or six times and finally I emailed them back and asked if they actually tried to post a comment and then checked to see if it’s there.
What the fuck, do you just assume that whatever little fix you’ve done has corrected everything without bothering to check? What the hell kind of tech support is that. I pay $300 a fucking year for hosting and except for the occasional outage only contact you guys a couple times a year. Most of the time the help I’ve received has been spot on. Maybe the real support folks are on vacation or something.
Anyway, after I woke up this morning I saw they had emailed me again and asked for the steps I was taking and screenshots so I sent them. For a second time. After most of the day has gone by They emailed me back saying that it’s my plugins and when they disabled all of them the comments worked. Fuck. Most of my plugins are stock. Jetpack, WPsupercache, etc. Couldn’t be bothered to actually tell me which one so I went through one by one and started disabling. It’s the comments module of Jetpack along with WP Super Cache. Both of which I need. That sucks. I have them disabled for now which means the site will be slower.
I feel like it might have something to do with the site being hosted in a subdirectory of my domain and then mapped to that. I’ll do some looking around at the WP site and maybe I can get some answers. If not I may back everything up again and wipe it and do a complete reinstal in the root of my domain. Hate to do that for security reasons but this has been a pain in the ass for the last nine months trying to get everything working properly again.
Update — Received an email back from my host.
“Hi,
Thank you for the update.
The issue was not related to subdirectory, its was due to the interference of plugins installed on wordpress site.
Please let me know if you need any further assistance regarding this.”
Wow. So the problem with my WordPress install was plugins written for WordPress by the guys who make WordPress. Someone should tell them. Or not.
Fucking tech support morons.
I’ll fix the shit myself. It’ll just take longer.
There were some issues with Lunatix crashing and marking people as being logged in even though they weren’t.
That has been fixed. Sorry about that if you got stuck not being able to log in.
Planning on adding several InterBBS games to the BBS pretty shortly. Rather than using my mailer and all the extra configuration I’m doing it the easy way and planning on using BBSlink.net as they already have a boatload of games set up and working properly. Planning on adding LORD, LORD 2, Lunatix, DoorMud, and Tradewars. They don’t currently run a BRE league so I may look into adding that the hard way lol in the near future.
So the eldest daughter and I are at the hospital currently. Anna passed out/had a seizure at work a couple of hours ago.
She seems OK and in pretty good spirits right now. Just got back from a CT scan, it’ll be a while before the doctor gets the results back I’m sure.
They called me around noon, I had just dropped some equipment off at one of my stores in Carrollton. Made it to villa rica in about 8 minutes. Lucky I didn’t get pulled over.
Thanks to my provider, Livingdot, for getting php upgraded on my server and helping to lock down some of my security issues that I had. Probably I would have caught some of them if the sites hadn’t pretty much lain dormant for the last five years aside from occasional updates. I’ve been with Livingdot for…I don’t know, ten or twelve years now and they never disappoint. I probably should add an affiliate link but I don’t remember it or even if I signed up for that.
As I mentioned in an earlier post I managed to recover quite a bit of the posts and some of the graphics from my sites. I have decided to just have all of my URLs direct folks here and just run the one blog. As little as I am writing nowadays I am better off focusing on the one site.
I will occasionally continue to do sponsored reviews, although as I was always pretty honest in what I thought about products, so never did get too many bids lol. Also, unless traffic picks up immensely and I have to increase my hosting costs there will be no ads. I won’t say never though as at one point a few years back the traffic was pretty high and I had to pay extra for bandwidth every month.
Don’t know how many crime posts I’ll be putting online but the urge does occasionally strike….so maybe lol.
Haven’t connected the site back to Titter yet (as far as automatically posting links) but I will probably do that very soon.
I have had to temporarily disconnect my Home Automation server and guest account. I was running a beta version of HomeSeer (the linux variant) and it kept giving guests access to light controls even though I specifically blocked those devices. Decided to move back to one of the extra windows laptops and I inadvertently unplugged my Raspberry Pi, corrupting the SD card in the process, making the data inaccesible. Not a happy camper at this point as that means recreating all of my events, devices, scripts, etc. Fuck me. Anyway, It’ll be back online in the next 24 hours or so.
Sorry about the recent site downtime. The BBS is still online at bbs.shadowscope.com:82 and accessible via web or telnet. Unfortunately due to several of my sites being compromised I have wipted EVERYTHING here and will try to restore some of the older stuff as soon as I have time. Considering I had 17 years of posts on this site, I dearly hope so.
So I ran across something today that I hadn’t seen before on my 64gb Nexus 6. When I upgraded to Marshmallow it was only recognizing 32gb of space (basically showing me 23gb free).
A quick search on Google turned up the following tidbit of information:
If you have TWRP installed, or if you choose to install it after you discover this problem, then you have an option that will preserve your data: use the new “resize partition” function within recovery.
Boot to TWRP (version 2.8.7.1 or higher)
Choose “Wipe” button (do not slide yet!!) then “Advanced Wipe” button.
Select the Data partition, then “Repair or Change File System” button.
Choose the Resize button.
Now you can slide to confirm, and it will expand the partition to it’s full potential, without disturbing the data.
It’s in several places, reddit and XDA included so not going to relink it. Apparently this was a bug with both Lollipop and Marshmallow. The above instructions, if you follow them correctly, will leave your data untouched. I have been running my phone unrooted and stock recently but it’s easy enough to load TWRP on temporarily and then go back to stock recovery.