For some reason I have been geeting server error 500 messages occassionally for this url – http://terrywassall.org - althoug a connection is made a little later or on refreshing the browser. Strangely I don’t seem to be getting the same problem with http://terrywassall.org/blogs/ or http://terrywassall.org/wiki/. On reporting this to 34SP they reported back to me (very quickly) “… the few connection issues seen in your error_log with phpfastcgi both relate to when apache on the server was restarted, this can happen when users add/delete things like subdomains/webusers etc . It looks like on this occasion it was the restarts that caused the errors to occur, php fastcgi however allows for idling and can sometimes become detached from the apache process…” with the offer of switching my account to pure phpcgi to see if this helps with the errors I am getting. Needless to say I had no idea of what fastcgi is let alone pure phpcgi. I was assured there would be no side affects to switching to pure phpcgi other than perhaps a ‘tiny’ decrease in performance. So the switch has been made and so far no more server error messages. I usually try to get my head round these technical issues as I do find it useful to have at least some idea of what the techies are saying. I’ve looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastCGI to get some background. A WP fourm post on server errors that has several mentions of fastcgi and problems is at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/259015.
Mediawiki post-spam clean up
I found that every page and discussion page in my Society and Environment Development wiki had been written to anonymously with spam links. Also most of my content had been deleted. Fortunately there are only about 6 pages but it still took me an hour to work out what to do and get rid of the mess. Basically, for each page (article and discussion) I had to revert to the last version before the spam was added, delete the page and then restore the page selecting only the revisions I wanted to keep.
Sadly I have also had to change the permissions so that only logged in users can edit.
MUWP+BuddyPress update
In preparation for updating the WPMU installation to the latest version 2.9.1 I have deactivated and deleted the BuddyPress plugin and themes. This also required the manual dropping of all the BP fields in the database. I started to deleted BB fileds too by mistake so removed all these as well. I think a bulletin board app was part of the BP plugin so hopefully these database forms are also no longer needed!
I may wait for the WP version 3 which will apparently be a merging of WP and MUWP.
Update: 16/01/2010 In fact I did the automatic update on the MUWP installation and it worked perfectly.
