Firstly, Merry Christmas. It seems to come round faster every year doesn’t it! Now, I must apologise for the lack of recent blog updates. Actually quite lot has happened on the DEOSS Community Server lately and it has been hard to keep track of it all. So here’s a very brief summary:-
- Automated plugin updates via rsync over ssh for all WordPress-based sites. Keeping all those plugins updated was becoming very tiresome and was causing delays in updating: A new backend script on the control server means that all updates can be made promptly and easily.
- Upgrade of all wordpress sites to 3.7.1
- Routine updates to the Debian operating system. These are generally performed on a weekly basis.
- Tweaks to the anti DDS (denial of service attack) system. Some users were reporting error 500’s when trying to perform certain functions on their sites. These issues were mostly due to overzealous settings in an Apache module called mod_security. Mod_security is an excellent module but its documentation is not as clear as it might be. And it is a complex bit of kit too with configuration settings that have far-ranging implications for a server such as ours. Therefore configuring it is something of a dark art. Nevertheless, hopefully all the issues have now been resolved.
That’s it for now. More routine work is currently being undertaken this week. No downtime is anticipated.