@davelightart I can verify this problem as well. Our WP server has an outbound firewall, and only very specific remote servers are allowed. In order for the plugin to work as expected, we’d need to add outbound firewall rules for every single IP address associated with each of the services–data.alexa.com has 4 just by itself:
# host data.alexa.com
data.alexa.com has address 75.101.155.168
data.alexa.com has address 75.101.162.204
data.alexa.com has address 75.101.145.196
data.alexa.com has address 75.101.154.43
I don’t know enough about the plugin (I’m the server admin, not the wp-admin) to know if disabling all these services (Alexa, Technorati, etc.) would dilute it’s value too much. If not, perhaps you could update your remote call with a very short connection timeout (or perhaps a connection timeout config value that persists across upgrades?) so it doesn’t bog down the wp-admin when it can’t connect to these services for whatever reason?
Thanks for looking into this.
