Here’s What’s Happening in That Viral Oil Well Bitcoin Mining Video
A video of a bitcoin mining rig on an oil well got thousands of retweets and replies, criticizing it for destroying the planet—but it’s not that simple.
— Read on www.vice.com/en/article/dy8b9y/natural-gas-oil-bitcoin-mining-rig-viral-video
Radiative Cooling and Solar Heating From One System – No Electricity Needed
Radiative Cooling and Solar Heating From One System – No Electricity Needed
— Read on scitechdaily.com/radiative-cooling-and-solar-heating-from-one-system-no-electricity-needed/
Quantum Particles, Magnetic Fields, and Migratory Birds
www.sciencealert.com/birds-have-a-quantum-sense-and-for-the-first-time-scientists-see-it-in-action
An interesting article on Science Alert about how cellular biology is influenced by magnetic fields. This can trigger cellular reactions that, in theory, can influence biological behavior. It is a theory in how living things, like migratory birds, can detect Earth’s magnetic fields and navigate using them.
Cleaning Up WordPress – Large wp_options.idb
Did your tiny AWS Bitnami WordPress server run out of disk space? The culprit may be unoptimized data tables in MySQL. Finding a 4.9GB wp_options.idb file on your server is not as uncommon as you may think. What makes it surprising is when you look at your wp_options entries and discover there are only 300 rows in that table with limited text in the option_value column.
Thankfully there is an easy fix as long as you can get enough disk space to manage the task. Start by looking for any log files or other files you are CERTAIN you don’t need so you can shut down web, php, and mysql services.
Finding Large Files
# sudo find / -xdev -type f -size +50M -print | sudo xargs ls -lh | sudo sort -k5,5 -h -r
This command finds all files on the drive over 50M in size.
Look for specific MySQL raw data files (wp_options.idb for example) in that list. Remember the table name for later.
Stopping System Services
Stop the services. On an AWS Bitnami WP server they have their own special control scripts in place of the standard Linux services library.
bitnami@ip-172-31-87-127:/opt/bitnami/mysql$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh stop mysql usage: /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh help /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh (start|stop|restart|status) /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh (start|stop|restart|status) mysql /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh (start|stop|restart|status) php-fpm /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh (start|stop|restart|status) apache help - this screen start - start the service(s) stop - stop the service(s) restart - restart or start the service(s) status - show the status of the service(s)
Stop all the services, then start MySQL only.
Cleaning Up MySQL
If you are doing system admin commands you should know how to find your data access credentials in the wp-config.php file. No need to go into that here. Find the credentials and login to MySQL.
No OPTIMIZE that table (and any others that you suspect have unusually large .idb files).
mysql> OPTIMIZE NO_WRITE_TO_BINLOG TABLE wp_options;
That’s it. One simple command may easily recover 4.9GB of disk space , making a 4.9GB file on a 9GB drive get back to a more reasonable 10MB.
Why WordPress core or cron jobs are not doing this on a regular basis is a question for another day…
Hate Spam? Turn Off Jetpack Email Sharing
The past few days have been spent diagnosing various email delivery issues from the AWS web cluster that is running our WordPress plugin store as well as our SaaS locator platform. During this process email routing was pushed from the servers through the AWS Simple Email System. SNS notifications were enabled to monitor the progress and provide some insight as to what was happening on the send mail side of things.
Not far into the mission something odd was showing up. Email delivery notifications were being transmitted from our documentation server — a basic WordPress install with almost no plugins running and a simplified theme. Yet in the “delivered” stack of SNS notifications there were random email addresses being spammed every 30-60 seconds.
The Culprit? Jetpack
Turns out the documentation site has Jetpack installed. It also has the default settings for the publicize sharing enabled. This includes email sharing.
After a good bit of research it was found that the mailing subsytem was being exploited through the front end interface for sharing a post via email. The Postfix mail logs provide immediate evidence of this.
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