[wp-hackers] Trackbacks staying in post.to_ping

[Max Deputter]

Dear WordPress hackers, I have the weirdest problem. My trackbacks stay 
in the to_ping column. But if I hack in a bit, I can launch them. The 
move to the pinged column but did not really ping. When I modify the 
code a bit, it works. But they still stay in to_ping for new posts. 
Here's my path so far.

Everytime I submit a post with a trackback, it stays in to_post. I 
looked in the code and it seems there's some kind of scheduled 
wp_schedule_single_event that triggers a general ping fest when there's 
a blog post. My earliest to_ping dates from 2008-08-11 08:30:42...
I made a test.php file with the following content:
<?php
require_once("wp-load.php");
do_all_pings();
?>
Then I modified wp-include/comment.php to add some debug info that will 
show up on the shell as I run my test.php script:
        print "I opened to " . $trackback_url['host'] . " with port " . 
$trackback_url['port'] . "\n";
        if(!$fs) print "FS Did not succeed\n";
        fputs($fs, $http_request);
        print "I put: $http_request\n";

Now I can see what is being outputted and I give it a shot with 
telnetting directly to a test blog I created on wordpress.com 
(awakers.wordpress.com) and surprise, it works with telnet but it did 
not work with the php code. I also notice that I got <error>0</error> so 
deduct that I should see the error message if I get wordpress' answer 
via code. I add the following two lines to comment.php
        $res = fread($fs,8192);
        print "Response:\n$res**************\n";
I am eagerly waiting to see finally what is holding my blog fury back.
Response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:50:13 GMT
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
Connection: close
X-hacker: If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs 
and apply to join the fun, mention this header.
X-Pingback: http://awakers.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php
Content-Length: 78

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<response>
<error>0</error>
</response>**************

What?!? I check on the blog and believe it or not, the trackback request 
is there. I make another trackback, remove the fread code and it doesn't 
work. At this point, I assume that closing the socket without reading 
some of it kills the trackback.

So that's where I stand now. The do_all_pings scheduled does not run and 
when I run things manually, it needs to read from the socket after it 
puts to it.

Here's some info about my setup that might or might not be relevant:
Running CPanel on Centos5.2 under a VMware ESXi server
The ip of the machine is 10.0.0.5 and I'm natting traffic in and out on 
required ports 80,443 etc
The router is OpenBSD's PF.

Regards,
Max