I had put in a complete hostname for the DNS servers, and 1and1 came back with this “The name server is not sufficient or hasn’t been approved” stuff. Insufficient and unapproved nameservers? Is that the worst error message ever? How can a DNS server be insufficient, as long as it’s providing DNS resolution? Who needs to approve a DNS server before it can be used? It’s all crazy talk.

Turns out 1&1 didn’t like the dot I put at the end of the name. Being used to using exact notation for DNS updates, I entered the domain’s DNS servers as “ns1.domain.com.” and “ns2.domain.com.” with that trailing period. Despite the RFC-proven correctness, 1&1 doesn’t like it.

Take out the trailing dot, and they accepted the servers just fine. Somehow the same servers immediately became both approved and sufficient. Yay for sufficient name servers! Isn’t that a funky looking lolcat with his sufficient DNS? No, that’s broccoli, never mind. I get broccoli confused with DNS far too often…

Let’s say you buy a domain name and then want to point it to your DNS servers. Simple enough, right? But with 1and1, it’ll say “updating” for about 8 hours, throughout which they’ll keep reporting their DNS servers as the authoritative ones. After about 8 hours, the status will change to “domain update done.”

But that’s a lie. I don’t know why it says that, because it’s not done at all. They still report their servers as authoritative (this is at the WHOIS level querying their server, don’t think I’m just checking my local ISP and that I don’t understand DNS TTL.) And the DNS button is greyed out if I select the domain that’s now supposed to be done updating, so I can’t make any changes to it.

Oddly enough, “domain update done” isn’t a status message that they explain. There’s a helpful question mark next to “status,” but that only gives you the following options:

• Ready - This domain’s settings can be changed by clicking on the available options in the toolbar.
• Update - This domain is currently undergoing an update. Please wait until the domain is ready before changing any settings.
• DNS settings incomplete with registrar - This domain cannot be configured until the DNS settings are complete.
• Waiting for approval - This domain is currently unavailable for configuration. Transfers usually take up to ten days once all the proper forms are received.
• Domain setup error - Please review the settings and correct any errors. You can also reset the domain by selecting it and then clicking on DNS in the toolbar. On the next page click on Reset.
• Other - If the status is not explained here, visit our FAQs for more information

Ok, so you can click through to the FAQs for explanations of other status results. But after much FAQ browsing, I don’t see anything about “domain update done.” They do have a question about being unable to change the DNS settings, but those all talk about errors with the setup. Some Google searching indicates that the message I’m getting just means they’re still working on making a simple DNS server change, and the right answer is to keep waiting, maybe up to 24 hours before they make their change. And then of course you have the DNS propagation delays while you wait for caches to expire all over the net. Good thing this is a new unused domain which shouldn’t have any caching issues (I’ve been careful not to lookup the name at my ISP until 1&1 gets the right info in there.)

Some day I’ll have to post about my scam experience with 1and1, from back when they were charging less for domain names than it cost them to get them, and they sent my account to a collection agency saying I hadn’t payed for a $6 renewal, even though they had my correct credit card information saved in their billing system. Nobody there was ever able to explain why I had to pay all kinds of outrageous fees to reactivate my account for non-payment, when they had all my billing information right there if they only wanted to use it (which they were supposed to do.)

Oops, I guess I just posted my 1&1 scam experience. There you go. My theory is that their attempt to use cheap domains as a loss leader for their expensive supplemental products (like hosting and crap) wasn’t working out, so they needed to pull billing scams like that one to make a profit on domain names. They increased their prices shortly afterwards.

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 55431 bytes) in /home/sitedir/public_html/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 158

My theory is that some default PHP memory limit was changed, but they didn’t respond to my support forum post asking about that. So I had to troubleshoot it myself. Luckily, it wasn’t hard to fix, and here’s what I did.

First, I had to figure out which plug-in was causing the problem. Since I couldn’t try disabling plugins from within Wordpress, since I couldn’t load that screen, I used the FileZilla FTP client (a great little free FTP client for Windows, by the way) and moved plugins out of the wp-content/plugins directory one by one to see if the site started working. You could also just use cPanel’s built-in file manager, or an SSH session, or something like that. The cPanel file manager is kind of a pain to move things around in, though, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

Eventually I found that it was the aLinks plugin that was causing the problem. I decided to tell it to use a higher PHP memory limit than the 8MB default that it seemed to be hitting, so I added this line to the beginning of the main plugin file:

ini_set(”memory_limit”,”12M”);

And that fixed it. aLinks now has 12MB to work with, which is enough. If it still hit the memory limit, you can try increasing the limit to higher and higher levels and see if that fixes it, although at some point you need to figure out if you need a more efficiently written plugin, rather than just wildly increasing the memory limit. (Although in today’s Vista world, that doesn’t seem to be a popular approach. Even my beloved Adobe CS3 suite has gotten crazy with memory usage. 12 MB sounds tiny by comparison… But now I’m close to ranting about ridiculous memory requirements, so I’ll just shut up.)

So I add something to my queue on Blockbuster Online. I wasn’t expecting to get a little DHTML-ish window sliding in at the bottom of the screen saying that they were letting all of my friends know what movie I just added to my queue. Really? Is that something that people really want?

I know Blockbuster was tying themselves in with Facebook, since on several occasions over the last few weeks they’ve asked me to link my Blockbuster and Facebook accounts for all kinds of nifty cool features. No thanks.

But now Blockbuster is automatically sending Facebook my queue information, even though I never linked the accounts? I guess just because that Firefox profile had a valid Facebook login cookie, Facebook’s Beacon javascript was able to submit the update anyway? Why were they asking me if I wanted to link the accounts in the first place, then? And they want to spread this to as many web sites as they can? I wouldn’t mind if the user controls over Beacon that apparently used to be available were actually still available, but they aren’t.

So I decided that the easiest solution — at least for now, I have a feeling they’re going to give in to Interweb outrage soon enough — was to block them.

Luckily, blocking Beacon can’t be much easier. I already have AdBlock Plus installed in Firefox, just because it makes web browsing a more pleasant experience. I try not to just go wild and block everything; I have nothing against sites making money from my impressions. But large ugly ads, or heavy Flash ads that slow everything down? You’re getting blocked.

Want to add Facebook Beacon to that? Go to your AdBlock preferences and add a block for http://*facebook.com/beacon/*

I tested it, adding another movie to my Blockbuster queue, and AdBlock dutifully stopped it. It’s not like Blockbuster’s queue management page needed to be any slower, and adding an extra block of Javascript to that page can’t help.

Luckily (apparently) for me, the wired connection didn’t work. I follow the Ethernet cable around to underneath the desk, where it’s connected to a black box with an antenna sticking out of it, and a power plug that’s not plugged in. Sure enough, the MGM Grand’s wired Internet connection just goes to a D-Link bridge onto their wireless network, so you’d only get a false sense of security if you used it. You’re really using an unencrypted wireless network when you’re plugged into that Ethernet cable.

Just something to be careful of.

Interestingly, their network also blocked access to my home computer for the first day I was here. I couldn’t SSH into my home machine, and couldn’t even ping it. But it was up, I was able to SSH to a friend’s Linux box and connect to my home machine from there. So I had to wind up tunneling SSH over SSH so I could use my home machine as an encrypted proxy connection to protect everything. I had to SSH to my friend’s machine, and then tunnel an SSH connection over that connection to get to my home machine. Then I could tunnel my web browsing over that connection.

And then the next day I was magically able to connect directly to my home computer. Weird stuff. Maybe they were blocking my connection to try to get me out of my room and back to the casino so I could give them more money.

Has anyone else’s Gmail account been down this long also? I’ve been getting some combination of the following three errors every time I try to get into it:

Temporary Error (502)

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.

Oops… the system was unable to perform your operation (error code 766). Please try again in a few seconds.

Oops… the system was unable to perform your operation (error code 767). Please try again in a few seconds.

Yes, those last two are almost the same, just one’s a 766 and one’s a 767. I wish they didn’t say to try again in a few seconds when it’s been 40 minutes. Every time I see “a few seconds” I get my hopes up and think that maybe I’ll be able to get back into Gmail soon, but so far it hasn’t worked out.

So, is it just me, or is anyone else having problems also?

UPDATE: Back up ten minutes later, down for 50 minutes total. Looks like I wasn’t the only one. I did lose the chat that I was in the middle of when it crashed, there’s no sign of it in my chat history. Interesting. Or not. At least it’s back. Time to update my local copy of my Gmail account from their POP3 interface. I always get a little worried that my e-mail is all gone forever whenever that happens.

I have one blog running from Fantastico, and upgrading it is nice and easy. Two clicks and you have a backup of the old install along with your upgraded install. No problems to date. So I wanted to try to get Fantastico to upgrade my other WordPress sites where I installed it manually.

The only issue is waiting a little longer for Fantastico to provide the new version, and for my web hosts to provide the new version of Fantastico. But since I’m so slow at upgrading manually, even with some hyped up security issues, that seems like a lightning fast response time in comparison.

First I tested it all out with a test WP install.

Setup

I used 2.0.3 for the first test. The MySQL database and username are account_wptest1, so it’s not what Fantastico would have named them (it uses account_wrdp1). We’re running in a subdomain on one of my domains.

After installing WordPress, I made a few changes to the options (permalink structure, turned off outgoing pings and trackbacks, etc) just to give it a slightly lived-in feel. I also uploaded a new theme, and edited one the theme files a little bit so it’s not stock.

Then I posted an “ignore me, just testing” post. Everything looked good.

Examining Fantastico’s Data

Looking at my existing Fantastico WP install (installed to a subdomain), there’s a .fantasticodata directory off of the home directory, and a “WordPress” directory in that. Then each WP install from Fantastico has a file in that directory, that appears to be in the format domain.name|directory. Since cPanel subdomains are just directories off of public_html, that’s how they are set up. A Fantastico WP install in the root directory is named domain.name|

The file is a PHP file that looks like this:

< ?
$thisdb = "dbname"; $thisdomain = "domain.name"; $thisscriptpath = "/home/user/public_html/dir";
?>

The domain name is just the main blah.com name, even for the installs that are running off of subdomains. For the one that’s not in a subdomain, the script path is just “/home/user/public_html”. No sign of the MySQL database password in there.

Then in the WordPress install directory itself there’s a file called fantversion.php, which is another PHP file that gives the version of WordPress. For example:

< ?php

$version = '2.1' ;

?>

One of my existing installs has a fantastico_filelist.txt file, which looks like this:

wp-admin
wp-content
wp-includes
data.sql
fantversion.php
index.php
license.txt
readme.html
wp-atom.php
wp-blog-header.php
wp-comments-post.php
wp-commentsrss2.php
wp-config-sample.php
wp-config.php
wp-feed.php
wp-links-opml.php
wp-login.php
wp-mail.php
wp-pass.php
wp-rdf.php
wp-register.php
wp-rss.php
wp-rss2.php
wp-settings.php
wp-trackback.php
xmlrpc.php

The other install (the subdomain one) doesn’t have that.

Converting to Fantastico

Back to my new test install. I created a fantversion.php file that says that this was 2.0.3, which it is. Checked the Fantastico screen in cPanel just in case it had noticed, but it hasn’t found it.

2) Created the file in .fantasticodata, but left it empty for now. When I checked Fantastico, that empty file gave it the WordPress path, and that plus the version file was enough for it to think that there was a WordPress install for it to upgrade. I had a feeling it wouldn’t work without knowing the DB name, but then that file didn’t have the password anyway, so who knows… Can’t hurt, let’s click Upgrade and see what happens.

Hey! Victory! Easier upgrade than manually FTPing up all of the new files and going through the WordPress upgrade process, no matter how easy they make it. And now I have one-click upgrades for that WordPress install in the future. And, like with other Fantastico upgrades, it automatically created its own backup of the database and all the files in case something had gone wrong.

Time to go try it on some real blogs and cross my fingers. Actually, first I wanted to test it on a really old version of WordPress, since I still had a few blogs running — gasp — WordPress circa 1.5.2.

I downloaded 1.5.2 from wordpress.org (being very glad that they keep every old release available there), did all the same test installation stuff, and then tried the upgrade from Fantastico. No problems, 1.5.2 to 2.1.1 without any issues.

Real Blogs

Ok, on to the real blogs. For some I downloaded backups from cPanel first, for others I just took my chances and clicked Upgrade in Fantastico blindly. None of them had any issues.

Well, ok, one had one issue. This blog was running WordPress 2.0.3 with 159 posts, 147 comments, and 7 plugins enabled, though one plugin was a “2.0.3 tune-up” plugin for fixing some annoying bugs in 2.0.3. Disabled that plugin before upgrading, since those issues are supposedly all fixed by now without the plugin.

When I clicked upgrade, it sat there for a while and then eventually gave me a blank page. Hmm. That’s a little troubling. Nothing seemed to have been changed in Wordpress, though there was now a 6 MB file in the fantastico_backups directory. The web host that site was on went down about 15 seconds later for about 2 minutes. That’s not an unusual occurance, sadly enough, so it was probably unrelated to the stress of my upgrade attempt. I tried a second time when they came back up, and this time it finished successfully (after about 11 seconds of working), and with a 10MB backup file.

Another blog I tried was an unusual case. This one started its life as a Fantastico install about 2 years ago, but then I upgraded it manually because I didn’t trust upgrading from Fantastico; I had heard several horror stories about it back then. Now I’m going back to using Fantastico. So this install already had the appropriate file in .fantasticodata but an old fantversion.php file, and so Fantastico knew there was a WP install but thought it needed to upgrade it from 1.5, since that’s the last version I let Fantastico touch.

It was really 2.0.3, so I just edited fantversion.php (and deleted the fantastico_filelist.txt file that was there, since I don’t know what that is and it doesn’t seem necessary) and let it upgrade from that. That blog, with over 400 posts, took 21 seconds to do — probably mostly the backup — and had no problems. I just mention it because it was an unusual situation.

Hopefully this will help someone else. I figure if Fantastico ever does choke on an upgrade in the future, I can just do it manually at that point if I have to. The only difference is that version file and the pointer to the install directory, so after finding all that out I’m not worried about going back and forth between Fantastico upgrades and manual upgrades. But hopefully everything will keep working from Fantastico without going through all of that.

And now I’ll hopefully keep my Wordpresses more current.

I go to Windows Update and start installing Service Pack 2. It’s working on it, working on it, on and on. But it’s not making much progress. Well, the progress bar is about 75% of the way through the install, and it’s now finishing up, or cleaning up, or something like that. But it’s been doing that for an hour or two.

The hard drive is chattering, and stuff is happening, but it’s just not making any progress, so I leave it there overnight. I figure the next morning it’ll either still be trying to do that, in which case I just stop it, or it’ll be done.

But I wound up with an error instead. Just a typical application error and the offer to report the error to Microsoft. Sure, why not. And it then directs me to a Windows Error Reporting web page for more information about the error. That page says:

This problem was caused by Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2. Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 was created by Microsoft Corporation.

There is no solution for this problem at this time.

However, your computer is missing updates that can help improve its stability and security.

Recommendation:

There are two options for you to upgrade your computer to Windows XP SP2:

Option 1: Upgrade online (free of charge)

Option 2: Order a Windows XP SP2 installation disc (A shipping and handling charge will be assessed on your order.

Gee, thanks. You don’t know why I got an error trying to install SP2, but you will recommend that I install SP2 in case that helps things?

And, immediately after getting the error message, the Windows Update dialog box reported that I have successfully updated my computer. Now I don’t know who to believe, Microsoft or Microsoft. One of them is lying to me.

After a reboot, it looks like it really is all SP2′d. Not an exciting post here, but I thought it was funny. Maybe I’m just easily amused.

Anything good in the new version? Let’s take a too-much-time-on-my-hands point-by-point look, just because I can.

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.. I like it. I’ve gotten in the habit of copying everything to the clipboard before I hit Publish, just because of a few server hiccups a long time ago that resulted in lost posts or nearly lost posts.
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post. Eh. Don’t really care. The WYSIWYG editor is too flaky and not that useful, so I never use it. If they improved that, this might be cooler.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs. I didn’t even realize this wasn’t in WordPress yet, I guess I just got used to seeing it in multi-user WordPress.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking. Oh, they did work on it. Spell checking is a little late to be useful, since Firefox now automatically spellchecks your textarea forms for you as you type. But I might have to play with the new visual editor to see if it’s worth using.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google. Again, I didn’t realize this was only in WordPress MU and not in regular WordPress. But the difference is that WordPress MU doesn’t let you customize the ping list, it just always pings Pingomatic, so there’s no other way to disable pings than this option. With regular WordPress this should be the same as just emptying out the ping site list and putting a robots.txt file on your server?
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system. I’ve used a plugin to do this before, but it’s handy to have it in the core WordPress code.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Sounds like a benchmarking project for someone with too much time on their hands (possibly me, but probably not.) Actually, the benchmarks are probably all in the WP development mailing list or some place like that already.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly. This might be more interesting to me if I kept any kind of blogroll. Do themes need to be modified to support sub-categories in it?
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project. Since I’m the only one ever seeing my WordPress login screen — and even that is hardly ever, since I always have a login cookie on my main computers — I can’t get too excited about that.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly. I’m a little scared of people throwing AJAX all over the place, since it tends to be used for stupid things where it has no advantage. I’ll assume that the WordPress team did a good job, but I’ll have to play with it and see.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private. That’s nice.
• Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent. Our admin? I guess that’s the wp-admin section where you run the site? Interesting, never noticed any visual inconsistencies before.
• The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background. Cool.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10. Cool.
• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages. Nothing that affects me, but cool.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio. That could be interesting. I’ve always thought that the upload feature and file management was lacking in WordPress. We’ll have to see if this improves things.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled. I use Spam Karma, so this doesn’t affect me.

And then some new features for developers. I’m curious to see what the “tons of new hooks and APIs” includes, even though I’ve only done a tiny bit of WordPress development myself. It sounds like the kind of thing that could lead to some cool new plugins.

I think the main reasons I’d upgrade would be for the auto-save and whatever new plugins show up that need the new hooks. Or because of bug fixes that they didn’t mention that turn out to be very handy. Or because everyone else is and I don’t want them pointing and laughing at me for not having asynchronous RSS feeds in the Dashboard.

Of course, they keep adding to your disk and bandwidth every week (1 GB disk and 16 GB transfer for that plan), so the 1 GB of starting disk that you lose if you wait two days will be added back after a week, but you’d always be 1 GB behind someone who signed up two days before you.

I’ve been thinking about signing up with them, because that much disk space would be great for off-site backups of my irreplaceable data. And so I did.

And it turns out that they aren’t really reducing those plans day by day at all. The hosting plans description page says I should be getting 194.5 GB of disk space, but my hosting account says I have 200 GB. The plans page says 1.945 TB of transfer, but I apparently have the full 2 TB (2048 GB listed in the Dreamhost control panel) that it started at before they began dropping the amounts each day.

On the Dreamhost blog, they explain that this is all because people refuse to believe that they can be stable and reliable if they oversell so severely:

People aren’t going to consider us a “stable” host until we offer LESS DISK AND BANDWIDTH!

But…ARGH! More disk and bw => more sign ups => more money => more resources => better service!

What to do?

Fortunately, I have a master-of-marketing pouch too (double-major).. so here’s what we’re doing:

Every day, starting tomorrow, the amount of starting disk and bandwidth we offer new customers (this does not affect existing customers at all!) will drop. You can see the amounts here.

(Don’t worry, once you sign up, your disk and bandwidth allocations will grow weekly just like before!)

And we’ll keep dropping them daily until our precious rep is restored!

(Or it cuts into our sign-ups too much.)

(Whichever comes first.)

I guess not really changing these values fits in with this; if it’s all based on appearances, then as long as they give the appearance of reducing their level of overselling, it’ll still work out. Not that this made anyone change their opinion, since it’s such a small reduction and since the weekly increases offset them pretty quickly anyway.

But I just wanted to get on these here Internets and let people know that they shouldn’t let themselves be rushed into a decision or anything, because these reduced plans seem to be strictly superficial and don’t actually affect how much disk and transfer you get when you sign up. If you do want to sign up right away anyway, though, feel free. Don’t let me stop you, I’m no signup stopper.

And of course, this could all be a temporary bug, and they might fix it by tomorrow. Your mileage may vary, allow 4-6 weeks for delivery, etc. But for me, signing up an hour ago, I’m getting the full 2-week-old values. I better put those extra 5 GB of space to good use with… umm… something awesome. I just need to figure out what.