Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

I have had a problem recently which has prevented me from accessing the admin pages on this blog, or indeed posting anything – which is a shame as it’s VMworld week and I’m “sure” you all want to know what I think .

This blog is hosted on wordpress.com – the free online service, it works for me as I generally don’t have time manage the WordPress patches etc. so it’s all handled “in the cloud” for me (see, that VMworld effect!)

I was recently asked to reset my WordPress password due to a possible security compromise (see this link) which I duly did, however I was then unable to login again, so I figured maybe I had fat-fingered the password – no problem I can just reset the password and click a link in an email in the usual manner.

Umm, nope.

No matter how many times I tried this wouldn’t work – I didn’t receive any email allowing me to change my password which meant I was locked out.

I spent ages messing with my mail account to see if it was a spam issue – it wasn’t ; I had another WordPress.com blog – I could reset the password on that perfectly which eventually ruled out a mail problem.

I logged a support ticket with WordPress, after a while they came back to me but couldn’t find the email address that should be associated with my blog.

The root cause? I had used an alias for my email account when I created my blog, rather than my normal e-mail account simon@mydomain.com rather than firstname.surname@mydomain.com which I normally use as my email address.

I recently moved mail service and it seems the simon@ alias was dropped in the process, thus the password reset emails were lost in the process – it was easy enough to re-add the mail aliases on my mail provider’s systems and I could then receive the password reset emails.

So, moral of the story – be consistent in the email address you use when setting up online services (or at least keep a record, and keep them working forever) – not entirely sure why I chose to use a non-standard alias, but I did.

Duh!

Normal service has now been resumed.