You have a directory that you want to password protect, lets call it “secrets”.  It resides in /home/mysite/public_html/secrets/ on the server.  Now fortunately you are using a hosting control panel like cpanel and you’ve password protected directories before (if not then have a hunt on this site or on google!).

Before you activate the protection you can view the contents fine, so you activate protection – driven by a .htaccess file… and then rather than being asked for your username and password, you get a 404 or a 403 message from wordpress “Sorry the page you are looking for cannot be found”.

Intrepid system administrators hunt through error logs, and sure enough the access log is recording a 404… however the error log is recording something different.

Permission denied: /home/mysite/public_html/secret/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

This error message has had a number of solutions in the past, including the infamous “reinstall frontpage extensions”, except these are long gone – not supported and never will be again, please don’t go installing them just to get past this problem! – It will end in tears.

Instead you just need to add a couple of lines to the wordpress .htaccess file in the root of your site (e.g. /home/mysite/public_html/.htacess). Go to the file and just before the main WordPress part

#BEGIN wordpress – add the following

ErrorDocument 401 /%{REQUEST_URI}/errors.html
ErrorDocument 403 /%{REQUEST_URI}/errors.html

This should set the site to working, now why does this work?

Simply put wordpress is often run with a pretty url mode (permalinks) where the addresses for posts are made to look more pretty.  When you request your secret directory the server tries to access it, looks at the .htaccess file and promptly tries to do a redirect, this invariably ends up at a page wordpress cannot access – this doesn’t happen without the .htaccess as wordpress allows access to existing real files, but the htaccess security says the file doesn’t exist until the password is entered and so it intercepted.

It’s all a bit confusing, however adding these lines essentially means wordpress can get out of the way when those errors occur, 401 and 403 are authorisation required or failure codes, so wordpress will ignore and the htaccess can safely challenge your.

Hopefully this will help if you come across this problem.

Why might you want to do this?

• To correct a mistake in a template (so put it in maintenance while you restore from your ever handy backup).
• While doing manual updating (for instance the automatic updating failed or a plugin is not available for automatic updating).

In order to do this simply put a file in the root of your wordpress install and name it .maintenance .  The file MUST be preceded by the “.” similar to a .htaccess file.

Normally this file has code in it to indicate how long the site will be under maintenance, and if the timestamp passes then the file is de-activated and the site is available – for instance to make the site be unavailable until now (Feb 17th 22:28 2011) do the following:

<?php $upgrading = 1297981662; ?>

However if you want the site to stay in maintenance mode as long as needed then the timestamp just needs to be kept changing so the following will do the job:

<?php $upgrading = time(); ?>

And that’s it – simple as that you can put wordpress into maintenance mode without a lot of hassle.

In no particular order I intend to do/get the following:

• Obtain a Macbook (Air / Pro).
• Learn how to program the Iphone / Ipad
• Get a tablet pc (Ipad possibly or windows 7 based one we shall see)
• New Digital camera to replace the now aging Canon EOS350 – (my current one has suffered from being in -28 and + 40 in it’s working life)
• Get this Blog back up and running doing the following:

1. Reviewing Iphone Apps – on the Iphone 4 and Iphone 3g
2. Document insights into MySQL from the servers I manage

• Get to grips (finally) with OOP and PHP (come-on I know JAVA so I really should have cracked this already but the old C programming gets in the way).
• Have a dabble in Cloud Computing – it seems to be here to stay and since 2010 had virtualisation 2011 is Cloud

That’s it for now – check back to see how I do

However somehow last week I lost my title bar, so no window title, no minimise or maximise button and the close button was gone. In addition the terminal window was now broken loading up a blank page.

After trawling through various forums and trying half a dozen fixes, with no success I finally tried turning off the special effects, and now have them back.

It’s a bit frustrating, I can only assume that one of the regular updates broke the driver that was working for me previously as no settings had been changed. Ah well – anyone with this problem, it’s really not worth the hassle just to have windows that wobble when moved and desktops that slide when changed

However one problem I have repeatedly come across is I install a program to find that it doesn’t work – generally due to hardware issues on my aging computer – such as low 3d memory etc..  In windows -t his is not normally a problem, but generally programs will test and warn you they are incompatible, however in ubuntu and Linux in general these progams let you install them and then fail.

The odd thing in the “old” days of using just command line usually programs would fail to compile and therefore install if any problems were encountered – however this robustness seems to have been lost in the drive to give the impression that the system can run more programs than they can.

However all said and done Ubuntu is generally good – I would imagine that given a few more releases it will really be able to take off – especially if more people use it with Dell’s new offerings giving more feedback to the developers.

So please someone just make it so I can’t install something that won’t work!