Maybe not that basic.

My blog suddenly stopped working, with this error message:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/bravus/public_html/blog/wp-blog-header.php on line 5

Apparently T_STRING errors usually arise when people forget to add senicolons at the end of lines in php, or to close curly brackets or quotation marks.

Looking at the php directly shows that, at about the appropriate line, there's this:

$ips=unserialize(base64_decode("YToxMjMxOntpOjA7czoxNDoiMjE3LjIxNS42Mi4xNzIiO2k6MjtzOjE0OiIxMjkuMTI4Ljg2LjIyMSI7aTo1O3M6MTM6IjIwOS44OS

Only it's followed by a few hundred more lines of the same alphabet-soup type code.

Does that look like something legit or something bent, given that the blog was working yesterday and stopped working today?

I'd guess something bent.

Time to update to a new version of Wordpress?

Yeah, it's about that time, and I'm expecting to finally gain heaping helpings of bandwidth today or tomorrow (because backing up a database with 4 years of blog posts might take some, plus all the d/ls, installs and such), so I'll give that a try and see how it goes. Worrying if my Wordpress has been hacked, though. The rest of the site seems fine.

Bravus haz been teh haxxored!

Good luck! I use the automatic update thingie on mine, now, and it backs me up and DLs the zip files and whatnot automatically, which is pretty kewl. Mostly because I do the maintenance sort of things so seldom I tend to forget how, in between, and it seemed safer this way.

Woe betide anyone messing with Bravus, I must say! I expect lots of people will retaliate if you ask...

More likely a borked setting or plug-in or some such.

I'm guessing the list of Bravus' enemies is fairly small.

That last comment makes me feel both warm and strangely inadequate.

So, I'm in the process of updating the WordPress version, with fingers crossed that that will also fix the b0rked blog.

But now I have a new issue. Three of the 4 computers in the house hooked up to the new wireless network with a minimum of fuss, but the final one - which has the same PCI wireless card as one of the others - is being a PITA.

As far as I can tell it's because the computer is an AMD64, but it's not running XP64, just normal XP Pro. So none of the drivers want to work right. The card is a D-Link DWL-G510 if thats any help at all.

I do have XP64 install media here, and the onyl reason I hadn't gone 64-bit was that the driver software for the now-obsolete web solution wouldn't run under it. So one option is to just upgrade to XP64. Anyone got experience and know how painful or otherwise that is?

Or drivers or tweaks to get the card to work in the current context would also be great.

Most of the online stuff I can find on XP64 dates from late 2005 when it first came out and there were few drivers and all sorts of issues. I imagine most of that is fixed now...

quote:

unserialise(base64_decode(

base64_decode PHP function is used to decode MIME data base64. And unserialize should get the serialized value in base64 encoded data and bring it back to probably an array of things to be stored in ips.

Probably something went wrong with base64_decode (corrupt data???).

Yeah, could well be just some kind of security or something, but my permissions seemed to have been messed with as well, so I'm inclining more toward the skulduggery theory. I guess I'll have a look at the file that replaces that one and see whether it also has that code block.

...aaand, we're back! No, the offending file was about 57k and the real file was more like 250 bytes, so there was something dodgy going on, whether malicious or accidental.

Anyway, the blog problem is all fixed.

Now it's just the wireless card.

And I seem to be reading that the XP -> XP64 path goes via a format and reinstall. Arrghh.

Hey Bravus are you a Linuxer too?

I've just upgraded to Fedora Rel 10... (communications painfully slow cus I'm yumming...)

I've played with it a number of times over the years, but I do enough gaming and enough production stuff on MS Office that it's always been more of a play environment than a production one. I usually have one distro or other available as a dual boot, just for fun, though I don't at the moment. Moving to a Mac laptop has made it a bit less attractive - though still possible - on the laptop. Fedora is k3wl, I've also played with SuSE and Ubunta and... meh, can't even remember.

Oh charming - Partition Magic screwed up the re-partitioning (of course, on the one occasion when I thought "She'll be right mate" and didn't make backups) and ate everything that was in the 32-bit partition. I'm attempting a salvage job now, but I have a horrible suspicion that it'll be a very clean and sparkling and empty new install of 64-bit XP by the morning...

Practice Safe Computing, kids.

Cross everything you've got - it seems possible, though not probable, that the humble chkdsk might have saved my arse.

Well, chkdsk did end up saving the bacon - unfscked the directory structure enough so I could boot up and back everything up to DVD.

But by the time that was safely secured I felt like I'd done enough work and could rebuild far enough quick enough that it was worth going for broke and just wiping the drive and starting from scratch with XP64.

Stay tuned.

(I'm still live for the next 20 or so as the backups burn.)

Might as well as least get a virgin registry out of the deal.

So, something like 15 hours later, (i.e. virtually all of last night and it's after 1 am now), I finally have a working, stable install of XP 64 on this machine and a working wireless card.

Yay, I guess.

So, I'm learning SQL. Yeah. I installed MySQL 5.1 on my windows vista box last night, ran the incidence thingie, then shut down. Next time I booted I can't get to the internet. I'm on a wireless network attached to a router. The other boxes in the house can get to the 'net, but not the windows box. The windows box can get to the network, but it claims that it's a local network only, with no internet connection. I mention the MySQL thing because it's the only change I've made to the machine, and I'm assuming I threw some access permission without knowing it, because I'm stupid and a newb.

Thoughts?

quote:

Originally posted by Bravus:
So, something like 15 hours later, (i.e. virtually all of last night and it's after 1 am now), I finally have a working, stable install of XP 64 on this machine and a working wireless card.

Yay, I guess.

This employer I have is hostile to 64 bit still. I am trying to figure out if I can set up a dual boot with vista and xp on this machine. I have no idea how to do such a thing? Anybody have any experience with it?