So, remember how I said I either upgrade my Linux installations as soon as they come out or I wait months? Well, this time around I’ve found a third path… I’ve just upgraded my laptop to 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) four days BEFORE it’s released.
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Here we go again… seems the pace of brute-force attacks on WordPress blogs world-wide has really stepped up in the last 48 hours. As I considered doing recently, I modified the WordPress core files on a couple of my test sites a couple of days ago to log the hacking attempts that I was receiving. These are quiet sites that receive no legitimate traffic and yet are currently receiving several hundred attempted administrative logins per day. Continue reading Admin users, WordPress hacking, botnets and brute-force attacks A couple of weeks back, I commented on the thousands of login attempts I see from drive-by hackers on my WordPress sites every week. I mentioned that every single one of them has been against the admin username – and hence it’s a VERY good idea to not have an admin user. I feel duty-bound to report that that’s no longer true. This morning, one site received a couple of non-admin login attempts. Predictably, they were against fairly generic usernames. You should probably also make sure that you’re not using names like these: I’m one of those people who either upgrades their machine the day a new distribution comes out or who waits 3-4 months until I’m fairly certain any rough edges have been smoothed off. My laptop got its 12.10 upgrade the week that 12.10 was released. My desktop machine however didn’t even get 12.04 until after 12.10 was released. It’s been sitting here very happily and patiently waiting for 12.10 and yesterday, for no reason at all, I decided it was time. Continue reading Ubuntu Upgrade 12.10 – Broken… And Fixed Again One of the additions I made to all my WordPress sites recently was the installation of a login security plugin. There’s several out there – I used a couple and found their basic functionality to be broadly similar: if a user tries to login to your WordPress using an incorrect username/password multiple times within a short period of time then their IP address is locked out of your login page for a while. The prevents (or rather, slows down) any hacker trying to access your system. Different plugins add different bells & whistles. Some such as Limit Login Attempts allow you to specify a harsher lockout period if the hacker comes back again. Others like Wordfence Security allow you to manually convert that temporary lockout into a permanent ban. I’ve learnt several things from reading the reports these plugins have produced. I promised I’d talk in more detail about the code I demonstrated at WordCamp Victoria last month, so let’s see what’s what with AJAX and WordPress. Firstly here’s a copy of my presentation (modified slightly to remove the 9MB video of Google Maps!). It’s a .ODP file so you’ll need a copy of Libre Office, or equivalent, to read it. There are also some further slide-specific notes in the presentation. What’s AJAX? Continue reading Adding AJAX to your WordPress Plugins – Part 2 This weekend I’m giving a talk at WordCamp Victoria about using AJAX in WordPress. The talk uses a couple of code snippets to demonstrate creating a simple plugin that passes some data from the client to the server and then updates the web page using data sent back from the server. Here’s the code for the final, most functional, plugin:
A week after I upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 12.10 and I’ve found something that’s actually broken. In 12.10, the node.js package has been moved from /usr/bin/node to /usr/bin/nodejs as it clashed with another package name (called, unsurprisingly, node). This is actually documented in the release notes (but only for Ubuntu Server… not for Ubuntu Desktop): https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuantalQuetzal/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuServer#Other I had node.js installed in order to run lessc, the LESS compiler. And, because of various complications due to my installation, 12.10 broke this. Continue reading Ubuntu 12.10 Upgrade… OK Something Did Break January 12th 2013 is the date for next year’s WordCamp Victoria. I’m a big fan of WordPress and I’ve benefited greatly from local events such as the Vancouver WordPress group and Vancouver WordCamp. I’m also a big fan of Victoria and, not having had a pint in The Swan (or The Bent Mast for that matter) for far too long, I thought I really should attend. I also thought it was about time I gave something back to the community and submitted a talk proposal. So here it is: Just upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 12.10 (aka Quantal Quetzal – although this is the first & last time you’ll hear me refer to it as such) and… well I guess I should be getting used to how painless this process (generally) is. Took exactly an hour from start to finish and left me with a fully working 12.10 system with all the post-release upgrades added. |
 
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