Here is a strange one for you. Open up WordPress, and make a new post. Into this post put the words:
“Delete”
Then the word:
“from”
Hit save.
Watch WordPress puke all over itself.
This is a very strange bug. Both words must appear in that order with no other letters between them, but you can have line-breaks between them and it still happens. What on earth is going on here?
The problem surfaced when I tried to edit this old post. I saw a typo I wanted to correct, so I edited the post and hit save, which led to the Bizzare error:
Precondition Failed
The precondition on the request for the URL /twentysidedtale/wp-admin/post.php evaluated to false.
Halfway down the page I quote Lileks, and that quote contains the deadly words. It took me a long, long time to figure out what the problem was. Obviously I wrote that post in an earlier version of WordPress that doesn’t have this bug, and now that I’ve upgraded I can’t edit the post without removing those words. I spent a long time removing secitions of the post until I had isolated the offending words.
One guess is that the phrase “de1ete from” is getting misunderstood or misused as part of a command to mySQL. Still, that really shouldn’t happen.
FURTHER NOTE: I’m using WP 2.0.2 and I have the fancy-pants editor turned off.
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*blink* It does, in fact, sound as though it’s passing that as a command to MySQL instead of properly encoding it as just more blob data, doesn’t it?
I’ll pass on the testing of this myself, but, wow.
You might try some other simple mysql commands. “Select from” would be a (risk-free) one to test.
“Precondition failed” sounds like an Apache error, not a PHP error. My guess is that there’s some filtering in .htaccess to prevent SQL injection, and it’s triggering on those keywords.
Let’s see: select * from
Okay, maybe not.
Yeah, select seems fine. But you can’t use the magic words in a comment.
mod_security is cautiously blocking any vaguely suspicious data, that’s all. Apparently, putting “SecFilterEngine off” into .htaccess disables it.
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