Had a hell of a time over the last three days with the blog not pinging or sending outbound pings. Kept getting an “error: 500. Can’t connect to blah blah (interrupted system call)”. Thank god for the one-in-a-million Nishant Rathi and his incredible support team (especially Sunil) at Web Werks.  

Sunil set me up (free!) with a parallel test server where I fired up MT and it ran without a problem. That enabled him to narrow it down to the firewall he installed on my server (and which he did, unbidden and gratis when I complained just once of a hack attack that over-wrote my index.php files).

Anyway, it seems that the firewall blocked outbound pings or the inbound ping responses and resulted in the target sites (blo.gs, weblogs.com, MT, blogrolling, technorati) not being pinged at all. He opened up one port and I changed the PingInterface line in mt.cfg, but that didn’t help either. Anyway, he’s got it working …

Point to note MT for instance doesn’t update if you republish a previously published entry and specify the ping address in the box below. It reports that it has done the ping, but it hasn’t. Only seems to work for new pings, or where you edit the categories and set the ping urls in the category details. Wonder why …