30th April, 2008
This Was Slightly Better
Today was a little better at least. Not as depressed, but still a little down I suppose.
At least I had a few good laughs though, right? Two of them I won’t mention because they’re inside jokes, but the third one, I suppose I can tell the story.
So these two guys come rushing into the store and grab their phone ordered sandwiches. They’re both out of breath. They come up to the register to pay for their sandwiches. Guy #2 says, “Thanks for paying for dinner.” With that, I assume that Guy #1 is picking up the tab, so I charge his card for two sandwiches. Guy #1 signs the paper and says nothing. Then I look up and here’s Guy #2 sticking out his card to me, as if he’s going to pay for his sandwich. Of course, I say, “Crap” because Guy #2 was probably joking and really meant to pay for his own sandwich. I had to refund Guy #1 in cash since I couldn’t put it back on his card.
Nothing too particularly interesting today. I went to work, went home for five hours, then went back to work for another four… more like three and a half since I was almost half an hour late to my second shift. In my defense, I was late because I was trying to clean up the entire domain from any bugs/hacks that got through in my stupidity when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.
See, in the newest version, the configuration file has a place that says “Secret Key.” I didn’t know that and left it as the default. I’m still not too sure exactly what it does, but I have a feeling that because I didn’t change it, my domain was somehow compromised and all these stupid lines of coding got inserted into random PHP files and random files were created.
The first time I caught this about a week and a half ago, I noticed that the edited files all had the same timestamp, or at least the same day, so it was easy for me to go through all the files and fix them. Then I contacted my host about it, thinking that maybe I wasn’t the only one (and in fact, I wasn’t). My host decided to try and restore my domain, which the compromised files intact, right after I had just finished cleaning it. When she did that, all the timestamps were reset to the date the files were put back in, so when I was cleaning today, I had to go through each and every PHP file to make sure that I had gotten everything.
And damn, does Wordpress have a lot of PHP files.
Everything is clean now and I’ve sent a notice/email to all those I host urging them to get rid of insecure scripts and to update to the latest version everything. I can’t wish that it will never happen again, but with my luck, it will, but hopefully the domain will be safe for a while.
Speaking of upgrading, I finally took the task of upgrading my main blog to 2.5 and I must say that I am quite pleased with what they did with tags. The only reason why I stayed on 2.2 is because 2.3 had shitty tag management; actually… it was non-existent, so the plugin I was using was far superior. But I upgraded and imported today, with just a few minor things to fix, and I am a happy camper. Good job Wordpress. Now I really want to get that sweatshirt (or mug works too).
Tags: website, work
Posted at 11:24 pm |
On May 2, 2008 at 6:53 pm Julie said:
May 2, 2008 at 6:53 pm
That’s a funny story heh. I suppose that’s why you should always double check. Always remember to laugh, it’s so healing. You’ve been doing a lot of work cleaning things up around your site, good job.