When you tweet your new posts with wordpress into twitter and use the YOURLS-Plugin for it, then these fail telling you that twitter is down and you should retry later. However that is not the case, the problem is lying at another level in the protocol for posting the tweet.

You can fix that by editing in your wordpress-directory,

./wp-content/plugins/yourls-wordpress-to-twitter/inc/twitter.php

and add a line 9, so that it looks like:

    $host = "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml?status=".urlencode(stripslashes(urldecode($message)));

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,array("Expect:"));
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $host);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);

Then these tweets work again.

For a project we needed some rather low-end server equipment and when shopping for it, I came by a bunch of Fujistu-Siemens RX100 server machines. For what we needed them for the dual-core box with a gig of memory, two 160gig sata drives, Lights-Out-Management (LOM via IPMI) with a price tag of less than €800 was ideally suited.

Whatever I buy machinery-wise that goes into any real production environment I want it to have LOM, can’t stand machines hanging or unable to remote-install it from scratch.What comes with the machine is Basic-LOM (power on/off, serial over ipmi). With a license key which nearly costs half the machine you can have virtual media and full screen console – don’t think it’s worth the tag.

One of the funny features is that as a server grade box when being out into the rack it halts for a keyboard error, having none of them. Might be ok in the windows world, not where I do stuff. That is the moment where serial over ipmi comes handy and after some fiddling around with the console I got it to do what it was supposed to do and reconfigured the BIOS to ignore keyboard errors.

When booting over pxe and being logged in the slow speed of the serial over lom being fixed at 9600 bps became a nusiance. Well, that is easy to fix, i just changed it through the admin interface. However now on every boot the system complained about IRMC-error and now comes the less funny part, some watchdog turned off the machine every 5 minutes complaining about a startup error in the event log. All watchdogs in BIOS and Web-Console were turned off – ultimatively it turned out that at least for what I saw there, whenever you change the baudrate off from 9600 bps apparently the bios looses the link to the management card and believes that the system is faulty and needs to be turned off – What a turn off.

Maybe that can be fixed with the license key for all the nifty features, but I don’t know as I wont buy it at the price that is being asked.

Otherwise so far the box runs fine, however that turn-off did cost me around an hour of finding the problem.