WordPress Backup to Dropbox column offset errors filling up web space

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

My website has been chewing through disk space recently. I couldn’t work out why and the largest files a few weeks ago were some webstat logs, so I cleared them down. Tonight, as I couldn’t upload anything (or apply any updates) I hunted around and found a couple of error_log files in my webspace.  The first related to a PHP file that was reading my Twitter feed using an old API and so was repeatedly failing. I removed the log and the offending PHP but that wasn’t the biggest problem. In my blog’s home folder was a 1.2GB error_log file – loo big to even read properly in Notepad, Word, or anything else I tried.

I managed to download a partial copy of the file (using Filezilla, then cancelling the transfer after a few seconds and saw lots of lines that contained the following error:

WordPress database error Column ‘offset’ cannot be null for query INSERT INTO wp_wpb2d_processed_files (file, uploadid, offset)

That told me it was the (very useful) WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin, by Michael de Wildt. I don’t really want to disable that but luckily I found a fix on WordPress.org, posted by Rich Helms:

The issue is file wordpress-backup-to-dropbox/Classes/Processed/Files.php

Toward the bottom of the program change from

$this->upsert(array(
'file' => $file,
'uploadid' => null,
'offset' => null,
));

to

$this->upsert(array(
'file' => $file,
'uploadid' => null,
'offset' => 0,
));

so change the offset default from null to 0 and the issue goes away

Sure enough, that change seems to have fixed the problem and whilst the edit to the plugin will be over-written with the next release, hopefully that release will also include a permanent fix!

“Unlicensed Product” errors in Microsoft Office

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier this evening, I noticed that my copy of Outlook was showing as an “unlicensed product” at the top of the screen. That seemed strange, as I pay for an Office 365 Home subscription, which covers my family’s various copies of Office.

Outlook reports intself as an unlicensed product

So, I took a look at the Office Account settings, and noticed that it wasn’t signed in to Office 365 for some of the connected sources.

Disconnected from Office 365 services

I reconnected to My Office 365 subscription, signing in with my “Work or school account” as that’s what the markwilson.it Office 365 subscription uses, even though the Office 365 Home subscription uses a Personal Account (formerly known as a Microsoft Account):

Which Microsoft account to use?!

After authenticating (and a restart), Outlook was no longer complaining about being unlicenced.

I’m not sure if it’s a complication of having both a Microsoft Account (MSA) and an Organization/Work and School (Azure AD) account with the same email address, but it seems there are various scenarios that can present this issue.

Thankfully this one wasn’t too hard to sort out!

Raspberry Pi FTP server

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve been trying to resurrect my SIP-connected Cisco 7940 as part of a review of our home telephony arrangements. In order to do this, I’ve had to configure the TFTP capabilities on my home infrastructure server (i.e .my Raspberry Pi). Previously, I’d served the phone configuration from a Windows TFTP server (long since gone) and the phone had just kept going with the old settings. Now, with configuration changes required, I’ve started to use dnsmasq for TFTP as well as DNS and DHCP (actually, that had always been configured, but without any files on the Pi to serve from TFTP)!

So, how to easily transfer the files? FTP to the rescue. I followed the Pi My Life UP guide to install vsftpd on my Pi, which meant using the following commands:

  1. Update packages and install vsftpd:
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install vsftpd
  2. Edit the vsftpd config with sudo nano /etc/vsftpd.conf, making sure it has the following entries:
    anonymous_enable=NO
    local_enable=YES
    write_enable=YES
    local_umask=022
    chroot_local_user=YES
    user_sub_token=$USER
    local_root=/home/$USER/ftp
  3. Create the folder to use for FTP and set the permissions:
    mkdir /home/pi/ftp
    mkdir /home/pi/ftp/files
    chmod a-w /home/pi/ftp
  4. Restart the FTP service with sudo service vsftpd restart.

After this, I could easily upload the files I needed to the folder that I’m serving TFTP from (/home/pi/ftp/files) – although for some reason the FTP server was listening on port 22 (not 21), and then distribute my new phone configuration…