Exim Update 10-26-12

Nov07
by Ike on November 7, 2012 at 4:13 am
Posted In: Community, cPanel, Hosting, News

At 3am CST, the Exim team released an update to correct CVE-2012-5671. An update to cPanel has been published to provide this update to our customers. Customers with Automatic Updates enabled, will receive the update with no interaction needed. We recommend all customers not using Automatic Updates, update as soon as possible.

To manually update your cPanel & WHM installation, run the following command in a command line:

<br />

/scripts/upcp --force<br />

For more information please see http://cpanel.net/exim-remote-co…-cve-2012-5671/

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The tail Command

Nov07
by Ike on November 7, 2012 at 3:48 am
Posted In: Learn, Linux

The tail command is a very commonly used command to pull the last number of lines from a file.   This is extremely useful when you want to look through error logs to trouble shoot an issue. You can watch a file live or look back as many lines as needed.

Synopsis

tail [OPTION]... [FILE]...

Examples

View the last 10 lines of the error log:
tail error_log

Follow the error log live:
tail -f error_log

Show the last 300 lines of the error log:
tail -300 error_log
or
tail-n300 error_log

 

Common Flags

-f  –  Output the appended data when the file grows

-n  –  Output the last number of lines in the file

-c  –  Output the last K byte of the file

-v  –  Always output headers

Check out all the options available with tail at the full man page

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How to password protect your directory…

Nov06
by Ike on November 6, 2012 at 2:28 am
Posted In: Apache, beta, cPanel, Hosting, How to, Scripts, Tools

If you are running an apache server password protecting directories is fairly simple. There are plenty of generators that will help you generate all of the code that you need to place into your .htaccess and .htpasswd files.  This can be useful to hide content that you don’t want people to yet, or at all. This also allows you to only allow specific people access to certain areas of your web site.

First you need to start by editing your sites .htaccess file. The link below can help you generate the code, but for the most part it should look like this:



AuthUserFile /path/to/your/.htpasswd

AuthGroupFile /dev/null

AuthName Please enter a password to gain access

AuthType Basic

.htaccess password generator

The AuthName is what will display in the password box that pops up when you try to access the protected directory.  Now that you have that you will need to create the actual password file. This is usually named .htpasswd or can be changed to something a little less common as long as you reference it in the .htaccess file.

You can generate the encrypted password for the .htpasswd file by going to one of the generators and putting in the user and the password you would like to use. It will then give you a line that looks something like this:



admin:gj4DiJhygDhgdHt5hu74

Password Generator

Adding this to your .htpasswd file will grant the user admin permission to view that site. I haven’t seen a limit hit on how many users can be added. I imagine that if you add to many it may slow the authorization process down a bit. To add other users just make sure that each user and password are on a separate line.

A tip for choosing the password is that it won’t work with any special characters. This means no $%^&*!@# in your password. It will work with capitol letters and numbers so you can still make a fairly secure password.

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Ping says my server is down

Nov06
by Ike on November 6, 2012 at 2:01 am
Posted In: Apache, CMS, cPanel, Events, Hosting, Performance, System

Ya ever have pingdom or some other monitoring site tell you your site is down? Then you ask your host about it, and they say that the site has been online the whole time?

Your hosts are probably telling you the truth. If you are using monitoring that relies on pings to see if the site is up or not, then you may not be getting 100% accurate information. A ping is not a priority to a web server. So if you server is busy, your server is going to serve the web page instead of responding to the ping.

If you load rises high enough, then your pings will start being rejected or timing out. This isn’t saying you are out of the woods. This may mean that your server is not tuned properly or you need to upgrade as you are pushing the limits of the server. I would have your hosting company check the optimizations of your server software. These can often be tweaked to handle more traffic, or limit the traffic to what your server can handle.

Most servers have some type of built in monitoring software that will help to ensure that your site is online. Cpanel servers use tailwatch and chkservd to ensure that all services are running. They will attempt to restart the service if they find it unresponsive. You may have seen these e-mails about clamd or exim failing. These are the most common services I see fail.

On cPanel there is a plugin called munin that you can have installed via WHM. This is a decent statistics program to watch over your server. It has a bunch of graphs that make things fairly easy to read and understand.

 

It is a good idea to monitor the health of your server as downtime can be critical. However if you are not using the right type of software you may be chasing a lot of false positives rather than working on things that need to handled.

 

What kind of monitoring software do you prefer for your server?

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WordPress helpful tricks

Nov04
by Ike on November 4, 2012 at 9:56 pm
Posted In: CMS, Community, cPanel, MYSQL, Uncategorized, Wordpress

WordPress can be a bit finicky at times. I use quite a few different little tricks that I have picked up to help fix some very common problems with wordpress.  Do you have any cools tricks that might make someones life a little easier when working with word press? Let us know.

Viewing WordPress without the DNS pointed at the server:

A lot of times we want to see our site working before we point the world to it. Because wordpress uses the domain name in a lot of it’s functionality this can be difficult. Without this little tid bit wordpress would show up all funky without any style. All you have to do is add the following to your wp-config.php file and configure to meet what you need.

define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://100.100.100.100/~username’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://100.100.100.100/~username’);

Adding the ~ with the user name at the end is the way to check out a site without DNS being point for cPanel.  You can just replace the IP and the user name or just the IP depending on your server setup, to see the site in full functionality. You can also make this change by place the same in the database in the wp-options table. The 2 rows that would need to be change would be the ‘home’ and ‘siteurl’.  This can be done via command line or PHPmyadmin.

All my Page links go to 404 pages:

This is a fairly easy fix normally and usually happens when a wordpress site is moved. Moving the site generally breaks the permalink maps. If you login to you wp-admin panel, go to settings ==> permalinks.

Note what you currently are set to. If this is a custom structure you are going to want to copy the structure to a note pad for later use. Once you know what you are currently using, set the perma links to default and then click save.  Now to rebuild the maps you can put the setting you had in there before and click save. Now clear your cache and check your site. Things should be working properly now.



Issues after moving my wordpress site:

Things can get jumbled when moving your wordpress site as we learned above. This little trick has helped me out in a number of areas. Mostly when moving or upgrading a site. By adding the snip-it below to your wp-config.php it tells wordpress that things are moving.

define('RELOCATE', true);

This has helped with the perma link issue above and other anomalies when moving sites. This even helped after a wordpress upgrade when the password was not being recognized by wordpress.

I lost my wordpress admin password:

If you have lost your password and you have access to the database we can change this.  If you login via PHPmyadmin to the database, you can browse to the user table. Choose the use that you need to change the password for and click the edit tab. You will see the section where the encrypted password is stored.

Go ahead and clear out the password and type in what you want the new password to be. There is a drop down menu to the left of the text box that you are typing in. You will need to set that to MD5, then click Save. Now when you are looking at the user in the table view you can see that phpmyadmin encrypted the password for you.

These are some good tricks I use on a day to day basis. I hope they will help you to get your site back up and running. I will post more as I find useful wordpress tricks.


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