Regarding cammiluna.xepher.net

[Kazzie]

Alrighty Xepher. I contacted you via e-mail and Cammiluna and I have agreed to bring this to the forums, to avoid any crazy e-mail problems again. So, if you could explain what you were trying to contact us about before, and why the site got disabled, we would really appreciate it!

Sorry to cause so many problems regarding contact. We don't really know what happened, there. But hopefully we can get things sorted out through this topic.

[griever]

Of course, Xepher can shed more light on the specifics, but for a general reason: http://www.xepher.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=418

[Xepher]

This is actually a continuation of an email issue. Apparently a lot of my emails to Cammi kept getting lost, and vice versa, so I said just deal with it here.

Now, on to business. Account was disabled because a script in the sketchblog folder keeps going zombie. That is, it runs, and never stops, and then someone else visits, and a new one runs and never stops...  and pretty soon I've got a dozen "comments.php" running on your account. I'd kill them all from time to time, but it got annoying. I disabled the account when I didn't get any response to my emails. Cammi emailed me, and I send one back saying I'd reenable the account, provided she try to take care of the problem, and that'd I'd give her a week or so to figure it out. I never heard back on that (and I now know why) and so I sent more emails, and with no reply, disabled the account again.

Now that we're here, I'm going to unlock the account yet again, but I need ya'll to try and take care of the problem. If you're using scripts you didn't write yourself, see if there's a new version you can upgrade to. If not, let me know, and we'll see about other options.

[Cammiluna]

I apologize wholelly  for this.

Question, though: Is it just the sketchblog directory?  I've ran two kinds of sketchblogs- a FusionNews one I've had running for a little over a year now, and a Blogger I've installed recently before the recent disable.  I believe the FusionNews is the one that's causing the problems since it was in the sketchblog directory (and it seems to be a magnet for spambot comments).  That folder is already deleted now, and if the same thing is happening in the "rarebox" folder,  I'll have it archived in my hard drive and deleted ASAP or disable comments if it's the only problem.

If the Blogger is causing problems too,  (it's running on my front page now), I'll take that down as well.

And Gmail is poop.

[Xepher]

Gmail works most of the time, but if it makes a mistake and you don't correct it (by removing my message from the spam folder) then it thinks it's done good and does it more in the future. You just have to watch that junk folder when you're expecting mail from people you haven't gotten stuff from before. You should take a look and see if you can find my lost messages and mark them not junk, just in case I need to contact you in the future.

And yes, I believe all the ones I was seeing were from the sketchblog folder. I'll let you know if the other folder shows a problem. Hopefully it's solved though.


Oh and if the forum's too slow and you don't trust the email, you can try me on AIM... Xepher42

[Databits]

Xepher, doesn't the server have a max time execution for php scripts set?

Oh, if you'd like me to look over that script to see why it's not terminating on it's own, I may be able to assist in it. I spend a lot of time looking over and correcting other people's code already so it shouldn't be a big deal.

In addition, if you are looking to just look into it yourself, try looking at all the loops to begin with. Make sure you don't have something being stuck in an infinite for, do, or while loop. In addition you could have it simply doing a bunch of recursive function calls, but I somehow doubt that'd be it because it'd be whoring memory then too. If worse comes to worse, the best method for debugging php is simple die statements with a message and moving it around in the file. This is quite easy in a server side editor (*Databits still wishes VIM were installed*) like VIM, Pico, Nano, or emacs. On this server it looks like Nano is the only one installed as far as I can tell.

[Xepher]

No offense to cammi and kazzie, but I don't think their up to debugging PHP themselves. Yes, the server has a max execution time set, but it doesn't seem to always work. If it hits a hard limit on CPU time, then it's killed, but if it stays under that, apache tries to terminate it, but then it leaves a zombie process. Usually this happens with spam bots that don't follow full TCP... they send a connect with a query, but never terminate the connection, so it just hangs.

Anyway, they seem alright with just ditching that whole folder, and it's hard to argue with the effectiveness of that approach. :-)

As for VIM... why didn't you just ask? VIM, and the english spell-check module, are compiling now. Should be usable as soon as it shows up in the path.

[Xepher]

Don't know if ya'll are still paying attention to the forum here, but now rarebox/egg is having the same problem. I think you'll need to find some new image comment script, because this is getting ridiculous. :-)

[Databits]

Send me the file and I'll debug it if at all possible.

[Xepher]

well, it's less of a "debug" issue, and more of a "it runs for 5 minutes straight because it's so full of spam" issue. I'm not as worried about it going zombie at improper termination... that's just a minor annoyance (which SHOULD go away with the new server's per-user mpm setup) The main problem is that it's an extremely inefficient script. What really eats the cpu up is that every time someone VIEWS the comments (rather than just when one is posted), it shows all of them on one page, and it does so by reading a flat text file with bbcode-like syntax, and then running 3 dozen regex replaces on each line of text, in order to put html tags in place of bbcode. When it gets hit by spambots about 100 times a day, each image quickly fills up to thousands of comments.

Code Select Expand


$fusnewsm = eregi_replace("\\[flash=([^\\[]*)\\,([^\\[]*)\\]([^\\[]*)\\[/flash\\]","<object classid=\"clsid: D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000\" width=\\1 height=\\2><param name=movie value=\\3><param name=play value=true><param name=loop value=true><param name=quality value=high><embed src=\\3 width=\\1 height=\\2 play=true loop=true quality=high></embed></object>",$fusnewsm);

And that's just one line! Now imagine 3 dozen of those, run on every comment, a thousand comments per page, for every time the page is viewed. The flat file storing a single page's comments is upwards of 5.5MB of raw text. It's just insane/stupid. The script is from fusionphp... which I'm just now realizing are the same people that make "Invision Power Board" another set of scripts that various users have had no end of trouble with around here. Those programmers need to DIAF.