然而我今天看到了这个贴子，这才发现还可以使用一个普通的网站主机作为我的代理服务器。与 Amazon EC2 不同，普通的网站主机是 24/7 运行的，而且你本来就要用它做你的网站，不用额外花钱。以上帖子是专门写给使用 Dreamhost 的 Windows 用户。不过，凡是有支持 SSH 服务网站主机的 Linux 用户也可以享受翻墙的自由感。我为 Linux 用户编了一个小的 BASH 脚本，其主要功能为:

• 与网站主机创建一个 SSH 隧道连接
• SSH 隧道用完之后，安全地关闭 SSH 隧道连接

用这个脚本，我试了一下上平时被 GFW 封杀的 youtube.com… 结果 Firefox 差点让我晕倒了! 用这个代理，网速快极了… 感觉好像我还在英国上网似的 (那边一般都用 8M 以上的宽带) – 你可以看一下视频:

介绍一下脚本的内容

export SSH_HOST=admin@yoursite.com # username@host

这个需要你自己改一下… 就是你的 webhost 给你的 SSH 用户名和主机地址。 格式为 用户名@地址 （凡是用过 SSH 的人都应该知道写什么）

if [ ! -f /tmp/.tunnel ]

看看是否已经有 SSH 隧道开着。有的话就将其关闭。没有就创建新的 SSH 隧道。

ssh -f -D 9999 $SSH_HOST "if [ -f ~/.tunnel ]; then rm ~/.tunnel; fi; while [ ! -f ~/.tunnel ]; do echo > /dev/null; done" &

创建新的 SSH 隧道，设定本地 SOCKS 端口为 9999。隧道将会开着直到远程目录 “~/” 里有人创建 .tunnel 此文件为止。

touch /tmp/.tunnel

在你的电脑上创建 .tunnel 这个文件。这样脚本就知道正开着一个 SSH 隧道。

ssh $SSH_HOST "touch ~/.tunnel"

在远程目录 “~/” 里创建 .tunnel 此文件，这将会断开你电脑与代理服务器的连接

rm /tmp/.tunnel

删除 .tunnel 这个文件。这样脚本就知道 SSH 隧道已关闭。

下载并执行脚本
可以在此下载脚本

下载后放在你的首目录，比如在 ~/bin/。用一个文字编辑器修改脚本里的 ssh 变量并用 chmod 改一下文件权限

chmod u+x tunnel.sh

创建连接
在终端中执行脚本，执行后可以关闭终端。

关闭连接
再次在终端中执行脚本并关闭 Firefox (如果 Firefox 还在用隧道的话，连接暂时无法关闭)

用 SSH 密钥进行授权
你或许注意到了… 以上脚本里没有任何地方可以写下你的 SSH 密码。这就是因为我在用 SSH 密钥来进行电脑与服务器的授权工作，这样更自动化而且比将密码直接写入文本的文件里要安全多了。先打开一个终端，根据一下步骤进行密钥配置:

[jonolumb@jonoxps .ssh]# ssh-keygen -t rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/jonolumb/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/jonolumb/.ssh/id_rsa
Your public key has been saved in /home/jonolumb/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
The key fingerprint is:
h7:10:49:46:ab:2t:3b:a3:36:2z:15:56:d4:f2:b7:3d jonolumb@jonoxps

请注意，配置时密码要留为空白。

将生成的 /home/jonolumb/.ssh/id_rsa.pub 的内容复制到远程服务器目录下，具体位置是:
~/.ssh/authorized_keys
要保证远程的 authorized_keys 和 本地的 id_rsa 文件的权限均为 700。
这样就可以自动登录到远程服务器了。

配置 Firefox 使用代理
创建了 SSH 隧道之后，就进入 Firefox 并打开:

首选项 --> 高级 --> 连接设置

选择“手动配置代理”并将其设定为:
HTTP 代理: localhost 端口: 9999

如果你用这个脚本遇到什么问题，请跟我取得联系。我很想听你们的意见。谢谢！

Many of you will already be familiar with reCAPTCHA via other websites – where it is often used to block spam comments on blogs or on user registration forms. Basically, it requires you to recognize two words in a picture and to type them into an input box as a means of proving that you are a human and not a spambot. You can see an example of reCAPTCHA in action in the screenshot provided.

I currently have the plugin setup so that it is activated on:

• New user registration
• Creation of new pages
• Anonymous edits that contain new external links
• Brute-force password cracking

If you are interested in implementing the plugin on your own blog, there is more information available here. It is a very straightforward and simple procedure.

For any interested parties, the hide/show function works using the “Scriptaculous” javascript library. I have to admit that I got this idea from Duane Storey’s personal blog – so I’m sending him some link love

If you would like the code, just look at the source code for this page. If you still don’t understand then just leave a comment.

Luckily, my friend Jacob over at jdpictures.co.uk was also a former Heart Internet customer itching to move to a better host. He had done some research and recommended Media Temple’s Grid Service hosting to me. Whilst I’m not going to go deep into the details of this new state of the art hosting technology, basically it means that if your site gets a spike in traffic, the server setup will immediately adapt to deal with it – meaning that your site should never slow down or be suspended. Media Temple also allows you to map multiple domain names to one hosting account for free (so sprayfly.com, inchina.co.uk, jdpictures.co.uk etc. can all be hosted on one server). This basically means that me and Jacob are able to share a hosting package with Media Temple (and share the costs) without having to make any compromises whatsoever.

Jacob decided to sign up for the service and give it a test – since then we have both been progressively migrating our files and databases over to the new server and making changes to the DNS records. Finally sprayfly.com, inchina.co.uk and radotages.co.uk (i.e. all my sites) are now hosted on Media Temple and I will shortly be cancelling my Heart Internet account for good.

So far, I have encountered very few problems during the migration and am impressed with the speed of the new servers. The Media Temple control panel is very smooth and easy to use and some of the new features that weren’t provided by Heart Internet have already come in handy. I have been using an SSH shell to transfer my files between servers (using rsync) and also used the shell for database dumps and imports which has made the transfer a breeze. It is of course possible that there are a few hiccups that I’ve not spotted – so if you notice anything unusual then please let me know (leave a comment).

To think that I have been forking out so much cash to Heart Internet each month when all along I could have got more for less is quite frustrating – but at least I’ve made the move now…

The WordPress upgrade went smoother than expected. After backing everything up, I used ‘rsync’ to update all copies of WordPress on the server and then followed the upgrade instructions for each site one by one. To my surprise, all the plugins worked fine and some even updated themselves automatically. Much smoother than I had expected!

Regarding the new design – I was fed up with the old one which was ugly, cluttered and difficult to navigate. I therefore downloaded a very mimimalistic WordPress theme called ‘Simpla’ which i then modified to add a few new features (Flickr badge, Search Box, Twitter Feed, Site Links, RSS Feeds) and its all up and running now.

As usual, please let me know if you encounter any bugs. I’d also love to hear anybody’s opinions on the new design.

Thanks

More recently, whilst making a few postings on this blog and others (all running the latest version of WordPress), I discovered that whilst I was pasting links to postings on friends’ blogs into the body of my posts, no pingbacks were appearing on ANY of those blogs. I began to investigate and soon found out that not only were pingbacks not working to external sites (or my own blogs for that matter) but any outbound trackbacks were also unsuccessful. On the other hand, all incoming pingbacks and trackbacks were displaying fine – as they had been doing for a long time.

Convinced that this must be some problem with the setup of my WordPress installations, I disabled all running plugins, checked all relevant options on the Admin panel and tried posting pingbacks and trackbacks to various well-known trackback/pingback testing site (such as TestTrack)… however all this was still to no avail!

Finally, I decided to prove to myself that this was not me just being stupid and made a new clean install of WordPress on my server and tried using that to post trackbacks and pingbacks. As I had expected, even a brand new and shiny WordPress blog was unable to successfully send outgoing trackbacks and pingbacks. This left just one possibile source of the problem… my webhost!

So… I searched around to see if anybody else was experiencing the same problem – lo and behold there was another WordPress user in exactly the same situation. Here is the thread he created in the WordPress support forums.

I’ve just installed WordPress 2.0.4 and cant get pingback to work (trackback does)
My hosting company (shared server) are wondering if its because they block port 80…could this be a problem?

This sounds vaguely familiar to me!

Yes, it is. The trackback is an outbound connection on port 80. I would see if they could allow it for your account.

Um, 2.0.4? You do know that there are much newer versions, right?

Uh oh… sounds like trouble!

Ok – thanks – yeah I did know about version – but my hosting company www.heartinternet.co.uk has a one-click install version which happens to be 2.0.4!

Ooohh! How strange indeed – this other user is hosted by nobody other than Heart Internet. Could this just be a pure coincidence…? Anyhow, I figured a quick support ticket to Heart customer support should do the trick… just ask them to open up outbound connections on port 80 and we’re sorted… right?

Well… actually no! Here is the response I received:

Thanks for the reply. Sorry but I can’t do that, it’s a global change and so not something I can do for you. That’s disallowed to prevent recursive loops from occuring to the benefit of all customers on the same hardware.

Ouch! Whilst I do understand their point of view here, I would argue that its not just me who would benefit from this change. I’m sure that what with WordPress being the most popular blogging software out there and Heart Internet being such a big host, there are plenty of other dissatisfied Heart Internet customers who would also like to see their copy of WordPress working properly. To add to the shame, Heart even provide a one-click install option for WordPress, have a look at their description:

WordPress is arguably the most popular blogging software available today! It’s easy to install and use and will allow you to have a great looking blog in minutes. Please note that this feature will use one of your MySQL databases.

Ahem, so even the guys at Heart Internet admit how popular it is… yet they insist on keeping outbound connections on port 80 blocked… tut tut tut! Most other popular web hosts support outgoing port 80 connections, I really can’t see why they are being so stubborn?

So… it looks like for the moment I have hit a dead end and for the short term will be unable to make any outgoing trackbacks and pingbacks using the WordPress platform. Heart Internet support said that they would “gladly pass long [my] comments” to the guys in the suits but whether this will really have any outcome remains to be seen. My only other option is to move hosts, which I am reluctant to do. As I have already said, until I hit this problem, I was quite satisfied with my web host.

Anyhow, let this be a warning to anybody out there looking for a new web host. If you want to use WordPress on your site and would like to be able to make the most of Trackbacks and Pingbacks… I would suggest that you don’t visit http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/ but rather that you take a look elsewhere…