William Hector's Blog

I’ve recently moved this blog onto a new VPS server in the UK, to improve my editing speed of other sites and most peopel looking at my blog are in the uk, It’s not to slow for the US or anywhere else anyway.

The point is when I tried to upgrade wordpress, or any plugins I got this error: “PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Invalid archive structure”

Some quick googling shows that normally the error is due to a problem with the http.php file makeing corrupt archives. I tried the new version but to no avail, I was then looking at the sourse to see if it used a function I forgot to enable for some reason and saw this line in /wp-admin/includes/file.php (which contains the extracting function):

&ini_set('memory_limit', '256M');

Now the server only has 256MB at the moment, which is enouge for my use; but this will cause the above error unless it is lowed, I set to 128M with no problems.

For a very long time my broadband randomly cuts out, I think it always has. Only for a few seconds though as my modem reconnects. The problems is I then get a new IP. With a router it doesn’t care. However I’m using, and have been for the last year using Small Business Server 2003 as my router. When the external IP changes it needs to renew the ip. How this was getting annoying as it seems to be increasing lately. So I made a small program (this is an ugly hack)  to ping google every 2 seconds, if it fails 3 times in a row, it releases and renews the IP. I also decided to log every time it has to do this. I then plotted a graph, with some interesting results:

I’m still logging to see how this trend continues.