Python Update Test

[Blaze]

Just testing because even though I upgraded Python and did an initial check, when I came back later I was getting a bunch of errors at the top of the screen. I down/upgraded to a lesser version and it appears to be working. But who knows.... (everything has been backed up)

Here, have a random image...

[Kruger]

I'll just leave this here...

[Blaze]

Here's another Python update test.

My ISP "forced" me to upgrade to 8.1 or else incur a $9 service charge per pay period to keep supporting the previous version.

And on top of that I upgraded the forum software to latest version.

Fun ensued after all that. My e-mail inbox got slammed with over 265 error messages in less than 15 seconds when hitting the forums.

Shutting down the forum slowed the tsunami of errors messages and I started the forum upgrade process. It failed successfully. Fatal error when getting to the forums. But deleting one directory and it started working and the admin console shows I'm on the latest version.

[Update] There still seems to be a problem with attachments. It appears an undefined variable is out there causing havoc. But the good news is the attachments are attached.

I wasn't too worried. All images, posts and database were backed up prior to the shenanigans.

And if you ever noticed how "quiet" this place is without ever seeing any of those annoying spammers, here's my sign-up security question that needs to be answered before you can register. Look how many times it was asked. Good luck answering it.

[Kruger]

It's freaking amazing that there are script kiddies willing to try getting in to see what you might have. My media server logs are amazing to browse through and see the same attempts at logging in as admin, or administrator. Yup, Windows is the assumed preference even though Linux is about 80% of all web servers...

[Blaze]

I haven't seen any of the script kiddies here, but my home server has seen a few attacks. Every now and then China gets all anxious about what's behind my firewall and tries their best to get in. Good luck with that. I've hardened the firewall to the point that I can't even access it from the outside. Hell, I can't even access the VM host server from the internal network. I have a console in the closet I use to do my maintenance. And the few devices that I have that do phone home were to ever become compromised, you're not getting anywhere since they're all in a DMZ that's isolated from the real network.

[Kruger]

My only assumption is it's script kiddies since each attempt seems to try multiple passwords for the same users (admin, administrator, manager, etc...) The IPs range all over China, Russia, and eastern Europe.  I'm surprised that I haven't found any from Nigeria yet though...

[Blaze]

Those Nigerian's tend to target mobile phones with text scams. I don't think that country has the bandwidth yet to do multi-pronged and repeated attacks.

[Blaze]

The new PHP 8.1 isn't playing nice with the forum. Their community forum has quite a few people complaining about the undefined variables and it'd suck if you weren't a programmer because all the "helpful" advice is basically berating people for not being able to debug the issue on their own.

So I'm going to be playing whack-a-mole with these errors. I've been getting about a dozen notices a day now with various pages throwing the error.

Here's a test for the attachment error. Keeping fingers crossed I added the right bit of code.

[Kruger]

I guess it's the "it was difficult to program, it should be equally difficult to understand and debug..." mentality.

[Blaze]

I had just updated the forum software and the following day I was greeted with 166 errors in my inbox. I forgot about the whack-a-mole effort I put in. Looks like I'll be starting that up again. I've already updated 8 files. My first iteration broke the forum with the lovely 500 server error code. Stupid parenthesis. Anyway, this game of whack-a-mole hopefully won't generate a lot of tickets...

[Kruger]

It could be the 375 pages on one thread that's a problem.  

(ps. I'm glad you're working on fixing rather than replacing.  I occasionally go through and chuckle at some of the posts and responses.  It truly was random at the beginning).

[Blaze]

What's the most impressive is that for all of the pages and content, only 666MB in file space is used and a 3.6MB database size. I was checking the hosting limits and I'll probably run out of physical file count space before actual storage space at this rate. But that won't be for a long time as I'm only using about 3% of my allocation.

But the good news is that my fixes seem to be working. No errors reported. It's working and I don't know why...

[Kruger]

It's working and you don't know why sounds like most of my programming career...