I just realised that posting of comments was broken on my site for at least a while. I had been wondering why there was nothing in my moderation queue for some time. The exact reason is interesting. First of all, this site is hosted under a chroot()-ed Apache, with mod_php5, running on OpenBSD. Because of the prevalence of PHP vulnerabilities - especially in terms of using them to send out spam and so forth - we've locked down outgoing connections from the apache user at the packet filter (PF) level. The exact rule is: block out log proto { tcp, udp } all user www. However, the captcha service I use - reCAPTCHA - requires that the webserver connect to its hosts to verify input. I had therefore explicitly allowed Apache to connect to the specific reCAPTCHA host for this purpose. It turns out that the DNS for the various reCAPTCHA services had changed, so I needed to update my PF rules. Sorry for the outage!
Niall O'Higgins is an author, event organizer and software consultant. He wrote the book MongoDB and Python, published by O'Reilly. Events he organizes include We Have Tablets, the #1 Bay Area Tablet Computing Meet-up and PyWebSF. He also offers consulting services for Mobile, Tablet and Cloud Computing.
