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As you may or may not know, Digitivity.org is hosted on Dreamhost. Anyway, they used to boot the operating system (which in Dreamhost’s case is Debian etch 4.0) from the network to allow for centralized configuration.

Now, they’re moving to local OS’s, which requires rebooting their servers. This means a few minutes of downtime per website as the OS reboots.

This mirrors the way that Dreamhost used to have NFS (network file system)-based home directories, but now has local directories, which increase performance.

Server Reboot

They gave advance notice of the reboots at Dreamhoststatus.com.

Unfortunately, it caught me a little off-guard. I had just finished editing and publishing a WordPress post, and when I went to the Tracewatch statistics module, it gave a PHP error. When I refreshed the page, PHP wasn’t even there!

I logged in to the server without a password through SSH, but it didn’t work since it wanted a password. This, to me, indicated that the public key file had been deleted. So I logged in using a password. I was floored when I didn’t see my own files, but rather the operating system files:

me@server:/$ ls
MegaSAS.log  cdrom  dev   etc	  lib	 lost+found  opt   sbin     sys  var
bin	     core   dh	  home	  lib32  media	     proc  selinux  tmp
boot	     data   emul  initrd  lib64  mnt	     root  srv	    usr

I put in a request to Dreamhost support, but by the time they got back to me 10 minutes or so later, the reboot had already completed, and everything was OK.

Note: the original shell I was logged in to didn’t reflect the changed files. I logged in to another shell to see my files again. This is a feature of Unix/Linux operating systems.

Although I was afraid for a few minutes the site was gone, in retospect, even if I were administrating my own server, I’d have to reboot it as well occasionally.

Dreamhost Backup

Dreamhost, of course, has a backup system, and you can request old files back through Support. There’s also a hidden .snapshot directory that contains a snapshot of your files as they were before. Finally, you can download your entire account backup to your local computer in a single file from the Panel.

Dreamhost Problems Custom Status RSS

One thing you can do to keep on top of status changes at Dreamhost is to put a custom RSS feed of just the things that affect the servers you’re on into your RSS feed reader.

I have this feed along with my FeedBurner custom status feed in a folder called Alerts:

Dreamhost Custom Status Feed in RSS Reader

It’s possible other hosts like 1&1 or Hostgator also have custom RSS status feeds, but I don’t know for certain. FeedBurner does, so you should grab that.

Dreamhost Custom Status RSS Location

To get the address for your particular server, go to the Support section of the Dreamhost Panel, which is at this address:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=support.msg

The RSS address is with the orange RSS icon:

Dreamhost Custom Status Feed in Dreamhost Support

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It was offering free accounts till January 31.

Now the offer has been extended until the 15th of February.

Granted, sometimes companies like to extend offers many times just to get everyone that could possibly be interested in their product. But since it’s totally free, there’s no reason not to sign up.

See my previous blog post about backing up Google, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress for details on how Backupify works.

Resources

Backupify

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For example, people who use Gmail prefer accessing e-mail through a web browser instead of downloading their e-mail and viewing it with an e-mail program.

But what happens if Google loses your e-mail? The answer, for some, might be Backupify, a new cloud backup service.

Coincidentally, today is the last day they are offering free accounts, and today is the day I found out about it. So before you read the rest of this article, go and sign up for an account here: https://secure.backupify.com/signup

Note: Although it asks for your personal details (including address and phone number), all you have to enter is your name and e-mail address to get signed up.

Why you need to back up your social media accounts

How much did you pay for your Gmail account? For your Twitter account? Facebook? $0?

Well, how much liability do you think they have if they lose your e-mail, your tweets, your updates? Right, zero dollars.

While it’s true that these services have all kinds of great servers hosting your data, it’s also true that problems do occur. If you get a lot of advantage from your social networking presence, you’ll likely not want to take the risk of losing all of your hard work.

Cloud services that Backupify backs up

Backupify backs up:

• Flickr
• Twitter
• Delicious
• Zoho
• Google Docs
• Photobucket
• WordPress
• Services in Beta
• Basecamp
• Gmail
• Facebook
• FriendFeed
• Blogger
• Hotmail

It will back up the following cloud services later:

• Youtube
• Xmarks
• RssFeed
• Tumblr

After you sign up, you’re sent to the Settings screen:

Backupify Settings

Just click on a Manage for a given service to back up your account on that service.

Backing up Twitter

For example, to back up your Twitter account, click on Manage for Twitter, and then provide your account credentials:

Backupify: Backup Twitter

Backupify goes out to Twitter, downloads your tweets, and backs them up.

You can choose to back up daily or weekly.

Backing up WordPress

Backupify can back up your WordPress blog, too. To do this, you first have to install a WordPress plugin.

How Backupify works

Backupify uses account information that you give to access your accounts. For some kinds of services, it doesn’t send a username/password over the wire, but rather depends on something called a token to avoid having to exchange authentication information.

To the extent possible, Backupify keeps your data in encrypted format. It’s true that you have to trust them to a certain extent. If you don’t trust them, don’t give them any of your user account info.

It’s worth mentioning that, according to Alexa, Backupify is about the 15000th most popular website in the United States, so it’s not just a fly-by-night operation.

My comments

Although I haven’t decided to what extent I want Backupify to back up my social media accounts, I’ve gone ahead and signed up for the free account, which, again, they say the last day for is January 31.

Thanks to Bob Buskirk, whose article on Backupify I just caught today.

Resources

Backupify

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2. Cadmus Helps You Avoid Social Media Overload
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It’s unclear who exactly it was that did the hacking, or how they did it.

Here’s how the Register (the UK technology site) showed the defaced TechCrunch site:

Techcrunch Hacked

Even the BBC is covering the story.

TechCrunch on WordPress

Since TechCrunch runs on WordPress, it obviously heightens security issues for WordPress bloggers. There are a few basic precautions you can take so you’re not a complete sitting duck for crackers.

Security on WordPress

1. Make sure only your user can read your files

It sounds sort of silly. After all, why would any other user be able to read your files on your webserver? Actually, guess again. On most shared hosting servers like Dreamhost, which is what most blogs use until they really become big, users other than yourself can actually read your files given the default setup.

For most files, this isn’t too much of a problem, but you might be surprised to know that many PHP-based applications (including WordPress) set your configuration file to be “world-readable” (i.e. other users can read it).

I’ll be posting in detail on this topic later, but for now, I’ll just say that you can reset permissions to prevent other users from viewing your files by logging into your webserver’s shell and executing the following command:

chmod -R o-r *

The above chmod command changes the permissions of all files (*) recursively (-R) to prevent others (o) from reading (r) files.

2. Make sure you have the latest version of WordPress

At least make sure you’re running no lower than WordPress 2.9. WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 had some nasty loopholes that crackers were taking advantage of to create hidden user accounts on WordPress installations.

Recent versions of WordPress allow you to upgrade right inside the web interface so there’s no excuse not to upgrade.

But be sure you have a backup before doing so.

3. Back up your WordPress installation

If you do get hacked, it’ll be handy to have a backup from which you can restore your site. You should back up both your database and your WordPress files and uploads.

Again, I’ll go into detail about this later, but for now:

Backing up the WordPress Database

There are webhost-specific ways of doing this. There’s also a shell command that’ll let you back up a database. But the easiest way for the uniniated might be using the WP-DB-Backup plugin.

Install it, and you can backup WordPress within the WordPress admin interface.

Backing up WordPress Files

WordPress files include the PHP and other files within the WordPress application when you first installed it. It also includes plugins you’ve installed and photos you’ve uploaded, as well as your themes.

An easy way to back up WordPress files within the admin interface is the WordPress Backup plugin.

Otherwise, the way you back up files differs from webhost to webhost. Some webhosts, like Dreamhost, offer the ability to backup all your files in a single shot from their control panel. If yours doesn’t, log in with FTP and download all the files in your user account to your computer.

Of course, this means you’ll be downloading thousands of files. It’s better to create a single ZIP file, and download that single (large) file. I’ll be covering how to do that later.

Resources

TechCrunch hacking

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/26/techcrunch-hacked/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/27/techcrunch_hacked_again/
http://www.loudable.com/techcrunch-is-hacked-and-up-now.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8480467.stm
http://pinoytutorial.com/techtorial/techcrunch-hacked-january-25/

WordPress backup

WP-DB-Backup
WordPress Backup plugin

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