I don’t know if they’ve already had it but I noticed that Dreamhost now has an option in their one click installation routines that has a setting to email you whenever a new version comes out – this is great to ensure that you are aware of any new security patches. As they are one click installations it is very easy to upgrade the software but you do have to bear in mind that they may not have a new version as soon as it is released (although apparently their WordPress 2.5 came out hours after the official release).
Unfortunately I’ve had to disable the ability to search the comments on this blog as apparently the script was using up too much memory. I ran a search this afternoon and ended up with the generic 500 Server error page. Looking through the error log (which can be found in ~/logs/errors/domain name/http/error.log for dreamhost users) I found that mt search page was being killed before completing but only if I used the SearchElement=both on the absoblogginlutely blog (the other blogs are fine). I must admit I am a bit surprised at that as I only have 3103 posts and 1446 comments so I wouldn’t have thought this would put *that* much strain on a server. Dreamhost just said that I was “using too much memory” and to check the MovableType forums for support 🙁 I did a quick search and that recommended fastsearch, but this doesn’t support searching comments either, so for the time being the search will only do the content (although interestingly I can search with no errors from the admin interface).
Hopefully this won’t be the same in MovableType4 which I might get around to upgrading too one day.
Update The feature is back – after clearing out the junk comments the feature started working again.
The first hurdle of installing MovableType beta4 is that the download page does some fancy redirection to push the download to your browser which is not helpful if you have disabled ftp upload up to your dreamhost website and want to download it via wget from within a shell. However there are a couple of sites that point to a direct location that was made public when the beta was first released so you can get it (for now) from sippey. There is a nice tutorial on installing MT4 on dreamhost
You can now disable ftp for users at the dreamhost panel – see the dreamhost blog entry on this subject. This comes hot on the heels of the security issue with ftp accounts being compromised. From what I’ve seen around the web, this issue was not limited to dreamhost but they seem to be the biggest (or public) hoster affected at the moment.