Posts under ‘Server’

I’ve come across this problem a number of times, of course each time I think “this will be fixed next time”.  Unfortunately it’s not the case.  What’s the problem then? 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 [...]

Mod Deflate is essential nowadays for sites, it speeds up the transfer of html pages & other files (such as stylesheets) by compressing them first. Now that servers today are so powerful there is very little reason not to use this, especailly since so many “speed up” tests will not pass without this being enabled. [...]

For a few years now I keep catching myself transferring files between Linux servers, in a silly way… What I mean is using somthing like ftp, or copying to my desktop and then up to the other server – all hassle (and in the case of ftp – inherently insecure).  Why do I do this? [...]

Had a problem earlier this week, webmail couldn’t always send e-mail. It was coming back with the following error:

SMTP Error: SMTP error: Connection failed: Failed to connect socket: Connection timed out.

Have you ever had a linux server or desktop which all of a sudden couldn’t create a file – running “df -h” shows you your disk partitions aren’t full?

You’ve logged in as root to check – and yup you still can’t write any files – even a “touch test.txt” fails with a message saying can’t write file – disk or partition full?

With linux servers a couple of things can take up disk-space unexpectedly. Log files is the usual culprit, but if your server is a rented one you might be stuck with a bit of a weird partition setup.

For some reason some hosts will give little storage to partitions which then get filled up unexpectedly.

You can remount a linux system on the fly like this:-

umount tmpfs

As many people know linux has a built in ramdisk – this is temporary memory and is very very fast (as it’s in ram). AS standard linux allocates 50% of your ram to this (don’t worry if you don’t use it linux uses all your ram anyway).

However sometimes you may decide the 50% is not enough (or is too much)

The Cpanel system has a feature to migrate accounts from another server – be it Cpanel or another webhosting panel – this often works, recently though I’ve had a problem with using it for Cpanel to Cpanel where it would connect but fail to transfer the backup file.

Those of you with Exim will sometimes needs to do some work on it – here’s a list of the commands which I find most useful: If you want to see what exim is doing right now : “exiwhat” if you think you have queue problems then you can print a countof messages in the [...]