Blocked Countries by WordFence

“China is in the lead” … of blocked countries. My humble website is constantly being sniffed at from the outside. To me it makes no sense on the surface – I have no confidential data or business secrets whatsoever. I do not do eCommerce or any business transactions for that matter. I do not even make poor stock market predictions!

But it makes sense to the potential intruders. These are likely bots just doing recon, searching for WordPress, Plugin or theme weaknesses and other possible pots of gold. Thankfully, I am fully invested in “WordFence”, an outstanding WordPress firewall.

SQL Server 2008 Database Mirror Setup Fails

Sometimes setting up Database Mirroring or Replication from one database to another for disaster recovery or fault tolerance etc. can be tricky.  I ran into an issue where the mirror kept failing, even after the full backup [from the Principal] and restore [to the Mirror] of the database and most recent transaction logs completed successfully. I encountered ‘handshake failed’ and encryption algorithm errors.

It was indicated in Event ID’s 1474 and 1433.

Fascinating! I elaborate on a resolution here.