WordPress MU

I have built an intranet using WPMU and so far it has worked spectacularly.

I do have one vexing problem. I can syndicate RSS feeds from external web sites, but not other WPMU blogs and other intranets with RSS feeds behind our own firewall. That seems rather backwards to me.

Can anyone provide a solution, or at least a clue as to how to approach troubleshooting this? I'm out of ideas.

Thanks.

Well here's the doc on troubleshooting: http://codex.wordpress.org/Debugging_WPMU

Some specifics would be helpful. When you say other wpmu blogs, are these ones on the same wpmu install or elsewhere? What are the internal urls for these feeds? Feed types?

I'm guessing because it's going out to the internet to get the info, and hitting the firewall on the way back in, making a rather long trip.

Tip: if you want to syndicate feed from one blog to another on a WPMU install, it will cause some extra consumption on the system.

@tdjcbe: The other wpmu blogs are on the same wpmu install. The internal URLs are all of the pattern *.blogs.company.com. So, abc's blog would be abc.blogs.company.com. Feed types are Atom and RSS.

@andrea_r: That's the very strangest part. I can syndicate any site NOT behind our firewall. I just can't syndicate any site that IS behind our firewall. That makes no sense to me at all. If the problem is that syndication needs to get outside the firewall to work, then I would have the opposite problem (not being able to syndicate external sites, only internal ones).

I'm completely flummoxed here (and running out of time). Does xmlrpc need public internet visibility to do its thing?

Thank you.

*bump*

If your setup is going out to the internet to pull the local intranets feeds, the firewall is blocking the request coming from the internet to the intranet.

You can try adding the IP of one of the intranet services directly to the hosts file of server that has your WPMU install and see if that cures the problem.

Thanks. Hmm. I was afraid you'd say that. I will indeed try what you recommend, however I'm 99% certain the setup is not going out to the internet to pull the local intranet feeds. That's because the syndication targets are all on the exact same WPMU installation. It's a single box running the database AND the web server (crazy, yes) off of a single, NAT IP address (10.*.*.123).

In other words:

abc.blogs.company.com syndicates content from bcd.blogs.company.com

A request from abc crosses the localhost loopback to pull feed content from bcd.blogs.company.com/feed.

OR

request from abc leaves the 10.*.*.123 machine, looks up the DNS entry for bcd.blogs.company.com and resolves it back to the same IP address (10.*.*.123), then pulling feed content back from bcd.blogs.company.com/feed.

Either way, shouldn't it just loop back?

I'll still try adding the IP directly to the hosts file of the server. Just seems odd.

Thanks again.

Yep.

Um, if you're pulling content from one blog to the other *within* WPMU, wouldn't it make more sense to just run some SQL in a function?

Edit: can you pull up those feed addresses in a borwser?
&
Is this on a Windows server/

I'm aware of the SQL option. However, it doesn't make sense from a non-technical user's perspective. I want them to simply be able to activate a feed syndication plugin and paste in the feed address. That's all my users can handle (and just barely at that). Since this blog serves potentially tens of thousands of blog owners, I can't do custom SQL queries for each blog that gets created and wants syndication.

I can pull up those feed addresses in a browser. Just can't make WPMU see them at all. I've tried ever feed syndication plugin out there with the same results for each.

This is on a Linux server.

I'm pretty sure it has something to do with how the box is setup/configured and not WPMU.

Otherwise I'm stumped.

On a non-intranet setup, people can do exactly what you're describing.

going to try finishing my upgrade to 2.7.1 and see if that resolves it. otherwise, I'll bother the guys who set it up.

Was this ever resolved? I'm running into the same issue.