WordPress MU

Warning! Problem upgrading . Your server may not be able to connect to blogs running on it.
Error message: malformed

I am getting this error when I run my site-wide upgrade script, it happens on blog ID 948. I tried running the individual blog upgrade script and it says it's up to date, but id like to get rid of the error. Thoughts?

anyone?

Anyone has a solution to this? I experienced the same thing when updating wpmu 2.7.1 to 2.8.2.

Though everything seems to be fine, except I get the error: (Warning! Problem upgrading . Your server may not be able to connect to blogs running on it.
Error message: malformed ) whenever I try to hit upgrade under site admin.

I am having the same issue on 2.8.2, thoughts?

I have too this problem updating wpmu 2.7.1 to 2.8.2.

Can anyone help to solve this problem?

Many of the blogs that were not upgrades are showing the error:

"The blog you have requested is not installed properly. Please contact the system administrator."

takes several days like that.

Help please.

This is terrible ... There are many errors in this latest version of wordpress mu.

And nobody's said anything wordpress team.

I'm also having this problem in 2.8.2. Isn't there any solution to this?

Have gone to version 2.8.3 and this bug is still happening, is it that no one team wordpress read forums?

These latest versions are having multiple errors.

take several days with this ruling, and nobody says anything. I personally am losing users and this is not pleasant.

- there's ONE developer for WPMU
- he does read the forum
- he also reads trac, which is the place you go to file bug tickets so they can be fixed (http://trac.mu.wordpress.org)
- he can't check for every possible error, he needs your help to trac them down
- if he can't reproduce the error, it is less likely to get fixed, so provide as much details as possible.

If hitting the button under Site Admin -> Upgrade fails, the blogs should still be "upgraded" when the user visits their backend.

This upgrade button only does any needed *database* adjustments - if any. And in the last couple minor version, there haven't been any.

So if you login to the backend, and the blogs say in the footer area that they are on the latest version, there *no need* to go hitting that upgrade button.

jupo - in your post from a week ago, there's really no details other than the error message on the front of the blog. Are the db tables there? Can you get into the backend? Are there any errors in the error log? How many version did you skip when you upgraded? Did you try turning off all plugins?

We need all those details (and more if possible).

I'm upgrading from version 2.7.1 to version 2.8.3 and when I went to Site Admin > Upgrade to complete the upgrade, I got the following message.

Note: We're new to Wordpress and this is our initial install of Mu. There are no blogs currently set up yet or plugins installed, so I'm presuming this error may be related to there being *nothing* to upgrade below the main site.

A primary concern is that now everything in the Admin area takes forever to load - easily a minute or two no matter what I click on.

I see nothing in the server error logs indicating any issues with Wordpress. Are there Mu specific logs I can look at, and if so, where would they be found?

This is our first attempt at upgrading Wordpress, and it just seems that the whole process if fraught with great peril, so any advice, guidance, etc. that anyone has out there would be greatly appreciated. I really don't want to roll back to 2.7.1, or delete this entire installation and just start over with a full install of 2.8.x (of course, the day after I started this upgrade, I see there's already another one ready to go!)

ERROR MESSAGE BELOW--------
Upgrade Site
http://sitename.net/

Warning! Problem upgrading http://sitename.net/. Your server may not be able to connect to blogs running on it.
Error message: couldn't connect to host

That's an error from wp_remote_get which is called during the upgrade process:

$response = wp_remote_get( trailingslashit( $siteurl ) . "wp-admin/upgrade.php?step=1", array( 'timeout' => 120, 'httpversion' => '1.1' ) );
					// do something with response?
					if( is_wp_error( $response ) ) {
						wp_die( "<strong>Warning!</strong> Problem upgrading {$siteurl}. Your server may not be able to connect to blogs running on it.<br /> Error message: <em>" . $response->get_error_message() ."</em>" );

So it looks like its trying to call your own website to upgrade a specific blog and then failing.

So I guess the question is why is that call failing on your server? Too many requests? Have you got throttling turned on? Are you basically carrying out a DOS on your own server? Maybe there needs to be a delay in there to slow those requests down?

More importantly - what appears in the apache server and error logs when this happens : that may well tell you a lot.

There's no throttling set, and the server doesn't get that much traffic in any case for requests to be an issue.

I don't see anything at all in the error logs, and the apache logs look fine.

I had no performance issues prior to starting the upgrade process, and I followed the step-by-step instructions, which seemed to work until this very last step.

We're ramping up lots of site and are hoping to simplify overall management by using Mu (and Wordpress in general). But if what should be a simple upgrade can have such a negative impact, then we may have to just use separate installations of standard WP for each and every site so that at least we're only *killing* - or at least degrading - one site at a time, rather than all sites in one fell swoop.

*sigh* - And I had such great hopes for Mu - and Wordpress in general.

So far we seem to have 4 people with this error, out of a lot of installs so I suspect its something which is on the edge on your server rather than an actual "bug" in WPMU.

You might have to put some debugging into it (like finding out what is in $response ) to narrow down the problem.

For example if you edit the code so it looks like:

// do something with response?
                                        var_dump($response);
					if( is_wp_error( $response ) ) {

Then when you run it you get a dump of the response array.

On mine I get the following back :

array(4) { ["headers"]=> array(7) { ["date"]=> string(29) "Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:04:59 GMT" ["server"]=> string(90) "Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.6 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g" ["x-powered-by"]=> string(20) "PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.6" ["set-cookie"]=> array(2) { [0]=> string(78) "wp_ozh_wsa_visits=1; expires=Thu, 12-Aug-2010 16:04:59 GMT; path=/canalplanac/" [1]=> string(95) "wp_ozh_wsa_visit_lasttime=1250093099; expires=Thu, 12-Aug-2010 16:04:59 GMT; path=/canalplanac/" } ["vary"]=> string(26) "Accept-Encoding,User-Agent" ["content-length"]=> string(3) "761" ["content-type"]=> string(24) "text/html; charset=UTF-8" } ["body"]=> string(761) "

So what do you get if you try it on yours?

This might sound mad but what happens if you try to ping the main domain and the sub domains from the server?

I'll continue to look at this, but being relatively new to both PHP and Wordpress, this may take a while.

I don't even know where to find wp_remote_get that you reference, so getting a dump and analyzing it will take a bit of digging for me.

This is a *clean* install, nothing's been setup on it yet, so there aren't any sub domains to check. I'm working remotely, so I can't get into the server to ping directly from there.

Thanks for the feedback - I'll continue to look around and see what I can track down.

The file you need to look at is wpmu_upgrade_site.php in wp-admin. The code you need to look at modifying is round line 26.

just as a check, I upgraded a live public site automatically from 2.7.x to the latest, just now. It went fine.

I then hit the Site Admin -> Upgrade link.

that went fine too.

And to recap: that particular upgrade link ( the second one) only steps thru each blog to complete and needed database changes. The same upgrade process happens when a user logs into the backend for the first time after an upgrade (first link, not second).

So - if you upgraded the site, then hit the other upgrade link, and there's no blogs, it should be a non-issues.

It's also worth to note it could be the dev environment, and likely on the live site will act completely different.

mostly cuz MU likes to mess with your head that way. :D

"This is a *clean* install, nothing's been setup on it yet, so there aren't any sub domains to check. I'm working remotely, so I can't get into the server to ping directly from there."

So there is nothing to upgrade apart from the base log?

Its still an odd error and I do wonder if its a DNS issue with the server not being able to resolve the domain for your blog for some reason.

Just to add on the positive side, I've had no problems upgrading and haven't noticed any slowdowns.

Someone else has posted this.

Did you remove your site url from the message.

It should look like

Problem upgrading blog.domain.com. Your server may not be able to connect to blogs running on it.

@Andrea_r - did you go directly from 2.7 to 2.8.4a? We've got one we still need to upgrade and I'm wondering if I'm going to need to do the intermediate steps.

Yep, I did. Wasn't a heavy-use install though.

There wasn't any db changes between those version, was there?

Ok, it seems that my problem is because I setup the main blog in the http://sitename.net format, and Wordpress (apparently) only works (or works best??) if sites are all setup using the http://blogname.sitename.net format.

I guess if I want sites that use top-level (rather than sub-) domain names, then I MUST use one the domain/site mapping/managing tools/plugins to accomplish that, and can't set up any sites that way directly withing WPMU?

This is a bit confusing since I'm using a virtual host in Apache to host this installation - with the FQDN (i.e. sitenname.net) I used when installing WPMU. I figured that wouldn't be an issue, at least for the primary site.

Ultimately our goal is to have some sites that use unique top-level domain names, and others that use subdomains - often of other servers/sites (using A and/or CNAME entries).

The odd thing is, the site itself never had an issue. It was only when I was in backend that it was apparent that something was seriously wrong.

Reading through the comments/suggestions, I decided to just try creating a new blog, named test.sitename.net, and it's running quick and zippy, with no apparent issues (so far).

This is after I got a dump by rerunning Site Admin -> Upgrade, and got the following (yes, my actual site URL is replaced):

Upgrade Site

* http://sitename.net/
object(WP_Error)#154 (2) { ["errors"]=> array(1) { ["http_request_failed"]=> array(1) { [0]=> string(24) "couldn't connect to host" } } ["error_data"]=> array(0) { } }

Warning! Problem upgrading http://sitename.net/. Your server may not be able to connect to blogs running on it.
Error message: couldn't connect to host

I'll install the multisite and domain mapping plugins and see if I can figure out how to correctly use them to acheive our desired results.

Now I have one more question - how do (or can) I reset/rename the original site so that it's topblogname.sitename.net rather than sitename.net? (note: I just tried Edit Blog in the list of Blogs to change it blog.sitename.net, and that only caused an infinite loop error in Firefox)

Thanks for all the help!

Basically your server can't see the site hosted on it. Very odd.

"Ok, it seems that my problem is because I setup the main blog in the http://sitename.net format, and Wordpress (apparently) only works (or works best??) if sites are all setup using the http://blogname.sitename.net format.

I guess if I want sites that use top-level (rather than sub-) domain names, then I MUST use one the domain/site mapping/managing tools/plugins to accomplish that, and can't set up any sites that way directly withing WPMU?"

Uh.... no?

If you have sitename.net set up properly in apache, and you install WPMU in the web root of sitename.net, then you shouldn't have any issues at all.

All the *sub* blogs will be in the format of blogname.sitename.net OR sitename.net/blogname/, but not the main site.

Hundreds, if not thousands of us, have WPMU working that way off a TLD with no issues off the main blog.

Something's screwed up somewhere.

Something is wrong - the actual site itself loads, it's the backend that's screwy. DNS and Apache settings all look good, I'll probably just do a full reinstall from scratch and see how that goes.

Thanks again for all your help and input.

But does DNS check out from the server? Can you ping your domain from a command line on the server?

Hi all,
I experience the same pb :

Warning! Problem upgrading . Your server may not be able to connect to blogs running on it.
Error message: malformed

And not an overload or other error message.

The process of wide upgrade site stop as soon as it encounter the same blog, each time i launch it. I know that this process is just a call (wp_remote_get) to each blog, and we can do the same thing just by visiting each blog. After severals tests, i think that the blogs for wich the wp_remote_get fails is the blog for wich the owner never connect, and it is possible because we use ldap to authenticate our users.

So the solution is : delete those blogs ...

Did you have the same configuration ?

I also had the same problem and fixed it myself. Read my blog post. It might help you.

Wordpress MU Site Upgrade Bug: Your server may not be able to connect to blogs running on it

I had this error - I had failed to copy over my .htaccess file to the folder where I had built my upgrade. Once I copied in my .htaccess from my old install she fired right up.