Category: Technology

Solving confusing ssh problems

On By westiIn Technology3 Comments

Last night I was setting up my new Time Capsule and suddenly lost access to all my remote servers over ssh.

All I got was the following error upon connection ‘ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host” and everything I searched around the web implied this was to do with too many connections to the server or incorrect reverse dns setup.

Neither or these issues applied to me and for a while I was stumped until it dawned on me that the Time Capsule had a much better NAT implementation it in with specific handlers for different protocols and I have all my servers configured to accepting incoming ssh connections on a non-standard port so as to reduce the number of ssh probe attacks.  Once I opened up a different port that isn’t used for other protocols by default it all burst back into life.

Hopefully, this will help someone who encounters the same problem in the future!

Documentation links

On By westiIn Development, Technology, WordPress

During a discussion on #wordpress-dev this evening I came up with the following oneliner for generating links to phpdocumenter output based on function name to support a php.net like lookup solutions:


curl "http://phpdoc.wordpress.org/trunk/li_WordPress.html" | grep "wp_list_pages" | sed "s/^.*'\(.*\)'.*'.*'.*$/http:\/\/phpdoc.wordpress.org\/trunk\/\1/"

It needs some optimisation though.  It’s too long to tweet!

Unplanned downtime

On By westiIn Rants, Security, Technology, WordPress1 Comment

Due to hardware issues this site has seen some unplanned downtime of late.  The server that was hosting this site (and providing smtp/imap/dns/ircbot services for ftwr.co.uk) started playing up and would randomly lockup hard.  After a few days of trying to resolve these hardware issues I decided that it was time for a two pronged response – build a new server to replace the current one and start to move some of the services off onto a VPS.

I had been planning for a while to get a slicehost vps server to move all the web properties onto so as to have more bandwidth available for visitors – this site was shifting 5G of traffic a month up my adsl connection on it’s own!

Hopefully all of this site should be running fine now I have got apache2/mysql tuned to run in the limited environment of my 256M slice and wp-super-cache up and running.

Please let me know if anything is broken!