cogdogblog: The Dog Ate My Comments Comments and Trackbacks

CDB Entry: The Dog Ate My Comments

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 06:56:33 -0700

Yesterday I was trying to clean out a swath of comment spam on a blog we set up for one of our college's sites, wiping directly from the database, e.g.: DELETE FROM mt_comments WHERE comment_blog_id=XX AND comment_author like "%poker%" DELETE...

comment by: blalor

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 12:04:35 -0700

Nothing like a disaster to show you your disaster recovery scripts are broken. :-)

I really do hate the captcha (?) you've got going on here... At least the numbers are fairly legible...

I use the following script to back up my MySQL databases; I stuck it in /etc/cron.daily/01MySQLBackup on my Fedora box:

#!/bin/bash

BACKUP_DIR="/var/backup/mysql"
STAMP=$(date +'%Y%m%d')

if [ ! -e ${BACKUP_DIR} ]; then
mkdir -p ${BACKUP_DIR}
fi

find ${BACKUP_DIR} -ctime +7 -exec rm {} \;

for db in $(mysql -Bse "show databases"); do
mysqldump ${db} | bzip2 --best --stdout > ${BACKUP_DIR}/${db}.${STAMP}.bz2
done

(bet *that* gets mangled...)

comment by: Alan Levine

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 12:26:06 -0700

Yes, I am discovering my technical goofups on a regular, daily basis. I am human and truth be known, pretty much a sloppy programmer.

My backup script was fine- it was those pesky file permissions when I moved the directory where the dumps are stored to a new location. Our backups do a bit more. There are hourly saves of everything in one backup file, and than on a daily basis, all databases are backed up as separate dump. Furthermore, we archive the previous month's data just in case.

And why exactly do people get so bent our of shape on captchas? I have seen the ones where you have to squint a bit to get 'em right, but when you compare the extra task of mimic typing in numbers to a total denial of 1000s of Porn, Pills, and Casino attacks, it is a small price to pay.

Unless anyonew wants to defend the posting of betiality and incest photo sites to an educational web site??

comment by: James Farmer

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 16:55:07 -0700

Dude... c'mon, come over to WP, you know you want to, c'mon now...