Tag: php

WordPress Error: cURL error 6: Couldn’t resolve host ‘dashboard.wordpress.com’

Background:

I maintain a WordPress blog that uses Jetpack’s Stats package.

Issue:

We started getting this error message when opening the ‘Stats’ page:

We were unable to get your stats just now. Please reload this page to try again. If this error persists, please contact support. In your report please include the information below.

User Agent: 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0'
Page URL: 'https://blog.server.tld/wp-admin/admin.php?page=stats&noheader'
API URL: 'https://dashboard.wordpress.com/wp-admin/index.php?noheader=true&proxy&page=stats&blog=XXX&charset=UTF-8&color=fresh&ssl=1&j=1:5.0&main_chart_only'
http_request_failed: 'cURL error 6: Couldn't resolve host 'dashboard.wordpress.com''

The entire Stats block in the Dashboard was empty, and the little graph that shows up in the Admin bar on the site was empty as well.

Other errors noticed:

RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: cURL error 6: Couldn't resolve host 'wordpress.org'
RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: cURL error 6: Couldn't resolve host 'planet.wordpress.org'

These errors were in the WordPress Events and News section, which was also otherwise empty.

This whole thing was ridiculous on it’s face, as the hosts could all be pinged successfully from said server.

I checked with Jetpack’s support, per the instructions above, and got a non-response of “check with your host.”  Well, this isn’t being run on a hosting service so you’re telling me to ask myself.  Thanks for the help anyway.

Resolution:

The machine in question had just upgraded PHP, but Apache had not been restarted yet. The curl errors don’t make much sense, but since when does anything in PHP make sense?

It was kind of a “duh!” moment when I realized that could be the problem.  Restarting Apache seems to have solved it.

Komodo IDE Headaches

I’m slowly coming around to the idea that an IDE might be useful for PHP/Symfony projects (still not convinced about other languages and frameworks) and I’m currently trying out ActiveState’s Komodo IDE 10 on Linux.

It looks great but it’s… buggy.  One day in and I’m already getting frustrated with it.

  • The preference file doesn’t appear to be saved until the application is closed, if the application crashes it’s not clear that your changes will be saved.  This might be a safety feature, but probably not, because…
  • At least some preferences don’t take effect until the application is closed.  Not the ones that you’re warned about like checking remote files for changes, but other ones like ‘Allow file contents to override Tab and Indentation settings’ (which itself is unreliable since at least 2011).
  • When changing preferences, there is more than one place to change: Edit / Preferences, Edit / Current File Preferences, and Project / Project Preferences (the last is not under the Edit menu).
  • The cursor blinks by default (which is super annoying when you’re moving the cursor around the screen) and there isn’t an explicit option to disable it.  You have to create a custom JavaScript script that executes at every file open.
  • The toolbar icons are heavily styled, making their use opaque and the tooltips mandatory reading.
  • It has already crashed while closing — which, per the above, I’m doing a lot.

It’s not all bad, there are some really nice features:

  • Vi keybindings, so things like ‘A’ to start appending to the current line, or ‘/’ to search the current file, are really nice to someone who uses vim every day.
  • I do appreciate the ability to script things
  • The syntax highlighting and coloring seems more reliable (i.e. harder to confuse) than average.
  • The installation to a local directory was painless, and an icon properly shows up in the applications menu (I use Mate).  The default installation dir is to your home directory instead of /usr/local (which is the right thing to do for trial software, imho).

I want to like this editor, I really do, but it’s just going downhill as I work with it more.  At $250 per license it’s hard to justify the expense to my boss unless I really like it.