Tech, filmmaking, & thoughts.
Tech
How to investigate an FTP hack
Feb 26th
If you have a website, there is a good change that one day you will get hacked. It happens. With so many possible ways to intercept connections & gain entry, you cannot safe guard them all, not permanently anyway. A determined intruder can get in. I myself have even had one of my cPanel accounts compromised. There are a number of methods for severely lowering the chances of an intrusion, but I will be saving that for it’s own article as it will be rather involved. For this article, I am going to show you how you can investigate a More >
DSO (mod_php) vs. CGI vs. suPHP vs. FastCGI
Jan 27th
# Updates: # 02/12/12 – Added definitions # 02/02/12 – Link clean up # 12/30/11 – Added in link for ServInt blog # 10/06/11 – better explanation for CGI with suEXEC
This is one of the most common topics that I see customers will ask about. As highly important as PHP handlers are, they often the least understood. They seem complicated, but its not too hard to understand. You don’t have to know that exact science of how it all works, but one should learn the basics if you want to take your website seriously. Picking the right PHP handler for More >
Fix: Could not edit /home/username/etc/ftpquota
Jan 23rd
#1 – The Problem
When you try to create or modify FTP users in cPanel, you receive: Error. Could not edit /home/username/etc/ftpquota
The only times I have seen this error is when you are transferring a cPanel account over from one web host to another one. The other host is using a non-standard method for the way accounts are set up. In this example, the transfer was coming from SiteGround. Siteground has their users’ etc folders created as Symbolic links as opposed to stored in the users’ home folders.
A quick way to verify if this is your problem is to do More >
Fix: Fantastico is not installed at the default location
Jan 20th
Fantastico De Luxe is an automatic installer for many 3rd party programs such as WordPress, Joomla, and OsCommerce. It integrates directly with your hosting application such as cPanel. Fantastico is most common automation software used by hosting companies. I personally do not prefer Fantastico, instead opt to use Installatron instead. It has a much better interface with many more features.
#1 – The ProblemAfter installing Fantastico De Luxe, you may receive this error when trying to access it from cPanel:
##################### Fantastico is not installed at the default location /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/fantastico. Either move the Fantastico directory from it's current location to /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/fantastico OR enable More >
Fix: Plesk Watchdog error of 01-01-2011
Jan 14th
#1 – The Problem
Ever since January 1st, 2011 (when the new year rolled in), Plesk servers that have Watchdog installed have started giving errors on the crons. Administrators receiving these cron error emails will see something like this:
##################################################### Cron Daemon <root@vps.server.com> to root@vps.server.com date Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 12:15 AM subject Cron <root@vps> /usr/local/psa/libexec/modules/watchdog/cp/pack-sysstats day ERROR: WDExc Error occurred while processing database query: 'MySQL query failed: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'group by service_id, type, round(unix_timestamp(time) / 200, More >
How to install Icecast
Dec 19th
# Updates # 06/22/11 – Updated this guide to use the newest version of Icecast (2.3.2).
*Note – This does NOT work on 64 bit CentOS (x86_64); it will only install for 32 bit (i386). If you need to install on 64 bit, use the guide found here: http://support.cast-control.net/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=69. Once you got it installed, you can start from my Step #3 – Configuration. I tested their guide on my personal server and it worked perfectly.
Icecast Installation Guide for CentOS 5I ran across a request from a customer recently asking me to install Icecast. I didn’t find any easy guides More >
