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Posts Tagged ‘Bug fixes’

As I have so many clients now running wordpress as a back end sooner or later problems are going to occur when the site going through a seemingly innocuous plugin update  becomes stuck in maintenance mode. The cause might be accidental, unwittingly self caused, network or server related. But fundamentally whats happened is you kicked off an update and probably clicked away or  were disconnected from the page where the update was taking place.

When you try to access the site you get a site down for maintenance message, come back in a few minutes, but it never clears! Don’t Panic, thats OK as you know the admin and user sections are independent….. you can login there ……..but it still shows the maintenance message. Now Panic!

OK stop panicking and go open up an ftp client and login to your site. Look in the directory where WordPress is hosted- the top level directory of the wordpress installation. Look for a file called .maintenance and delete it.

Now refresh the site in your browser, all should now be well, and you should be able to login again. I recommend you either redo the plugin update correctly this time or if in doubt, do the update manually, usually just a case of uploading the new plugin files over ftp.

Hope this helps

A client asked me to look at a PC that had been infected by a “virus”. In fact what it had been infected by was a particularly abhorrent bit of malware called Ant Spyware Soft.

It was probably inadvertantly installed by my client by clicking on one of thos warning boxes that splash up in some browser windows warning you you have an infected machine- the box looks very like a windows error but its actually not.

An article in PC Pro recently was saying this type of malware is serviced by Russian Mafia types as a way to effectively extort sums from web users by installing their dodgy AV software which then watches their internet history recoding Credit card numbers etc and relaying to the ” mother ship”.

The PC was installed with F Secure 2010 AV but the damage was done probably byt he client authorising the install unwittingly. F Secure could detect the system modification attempt by a service effectively a random string name. But it could not detect the virus it seemed nor stop its troublesome attempts to scare the user.

It did a number of bad things.

1) It kept warning that it had detected an intrusion attempt- funny as when I had the machine it was not even connected to the internet- worth a test if you ever see such a warning- disconnect and see if it persists. I always disconnect any infected machines when I am awar eof them and recommend you do too.

2)It kept flagging up spurious process crashes.

3) It disabled access to services.msc- the control panel services applet and taskmgr.exe (so you could neither id or disable it by conventional means)

4) Once you opened a IE8 browser window it went mental – constant alerts resulting in many red shields inthe system tray, and sometimes a Windows AV type window saying AntiSpyware Soft – click to purchase and enable- to sort tht eproblem. of course you would be mental to. It also sent the web browser to dodgy websites like p*rno.com and vi*gra.com (and probably others) Heightening the fear factor or the client!

5) I did a bit research onthe web (as you do and the best info i found was on www.spywareremove.com) It gae free, manual removal instructions which were spot on and worked a treat. I would say – you need to use Safe Mode to do the steps listed and be happy inthe registry. I found a couple of key s that differed from their instructions but they were easy to spot and I put it down to the variable behaviour of the malware)

6) With the files deleted its back t normal, but I have installed Google Chrome on the machine as its less susceptible to some of the aspects of such malware.

Just encountered an issue with the Transcend JF220 Secure USB stick. This stick uses a finger print reader to secure the partitioned USB stick.The stick works fine in my Windows XP system but once used with my Vista system I noticed that the main icons off the Start button stopped working. How odd?

I got hold of a utility called ShellExView from Nirsoft which allows you to see which shell extensions are running on your platform and to selectively disable them. Be warned disable them one at a time and only those you suspect. If your not sure ask a PC savvy friend!

Anyway working chronologically backwards- ie newest first I noticed an Icon Handler extension supplied by Arachnoid Biometrics Identification Group Corp. Disabling this restored the icon function onthe start button.

Unfortunately I see no easy way to uninstall this as it has no entry in the Control Panel. Looks like a manual/ registry hack job for later.

I need to look into if there is a fix for this first though. Perhaps an updated driver for the Transcend USB stick.

I being a web developer (amongst other things!) take great care to back up my PC daily, as I have thousands of lines of code belonging to numerous websites that i need to be able to work on and update.

My workstation runs Vista Home Premium. Now really  should have Vista Business but its a long story that I am not going to go into here why I have Home premium.

I do my backups two ways, I run Sync Toy every day to an external drive and I run Windows Vista Backup to an internal drive.

Following a recent crash with my Raid array (a striped set) I went to restore my user data from a back up. I was surprised to find that none of my files with php extensions were there.

Fortunately I had the copies from by Sync Toy images so I was OK but its worth stating that unless all your interested in is the back up of “personal” files- ie images, mp3s and common file extension docs like xls or doc files you cannot rely on the back up tool for Vista to save you. Somewhat oddly it does save html files- probably due to the fact that many programs can generate html files as an output format, that are not deemed as “professional” file types.

Be warned!