MT 3.32 — HNBP

I have now upgraded this site to Movable Type 3.32. The upgrade process was not without problems — but these could have been avoided with a little more attentiveness to similar issues during past upgrades.

Kiss my ASCII

First off, you must upload ASCII files explicitly as ASCII. Don’t trust whatever FTP app you use to know the difference in AUTO mode; when uploading those CGI, PL, PM, TMPL, PHP, and HTML files, specify ASCII — most especially for the main CGI files in the MT root and the lib and extlib directories. Running the upgraded MT install the first time got me a cryptic Bad ObjectDriver config error in mysql.pm, and I worried at first that my host had changed something in DBD::mysql just as I was in the process of upgrading. It turned out that Filezilla had simply uploaded the PM files as binary, and a re-upload in ASCII got everything running just fine.

And I Would Walk 500 More

Also note that if you are publishing static PHP files in archive directories, permissions are important. MovableType CHMODs archive files and directories to 777, and a lot of web hosts won’t let you display world-writable files and directories. Result: 500 Internal Server Errors on new entries (and also old ones on Rebuild). This wouldn’t have been an issue if I hadn’t decided to start with a fresh mt-config.cgi, quite forgetting to copy the pertinent suexec/cgiwrap directives from the old one. If you’re publishing PHP or CGI files from your MT templates, don’t forget to add these important lines to your mt-config.cgi:

DBUmask 0022


HTMLUmask 0022
UploadUmask 0022

DirUmask 0022

Back to the Trackback

Because I’m a sucker for punishment, I’ve re-enabled trackbacks. Despite having been burned before, (1,2) I can’t help but want this awesome exotic cross-linkage technology to work. Sure enough, the trackback spam has already started rolling in, though the filters have performed admirably so far; not one spam ping has gotten through to an entry page yet. If the filters continue to work, without overworking the server, I might just keep trackback on.