I had a look at the EEE PC at the weekend, it looks kind of cool and weighs virtually nothing… I know, I know, I know – it was designed for the younger market, but this laptop has infinite appeal for almost any IT professional, at sub 1kg with a solid state disk? I quite liked the OS that was installed, but a friend suggested installing XP on it (and upping the disk to 4GB or buying a 4GB version) as then it will support everything XP supports, which means I can plug my phone in as a USB 3G modem – that’s the key thing. I could feasibly get away with this being what I take on holiday (sorry… Continue reading »

As far as webmail goes, I’m a Neomail user, have been for a long while. I don’t know what it is about it – it’s clean interface and quick loading speed maybe? But the time has come for change as cPanel are deprecating the mbox format, why I hear you ask? Reasons for Deprecating mbox The new system has several benefits, – It’s the way forward – Better performance – Improved mailbox locking; – Simultaneous IMAP account access – Use of open source code. Is it Necessary? It is expected that cPanel will continue to support mbox, but will switch to maildir as the default soon. As such I feel I’m probably going to have to take the plunge. We… Continue reading »

In a post way back in January of 2005, I discussed the software MyTop for monitoring connections on your MySQL server. I’ve had it installed and use it semi-regularly – however, it doesn’t always work – often I am greeted with the following error: Cannot connect to MySQL server. Please check the: * database you specified “test” (default is “test”) * username you specified “root” (default is “root”) * password you specified “” (default is “”) * hostname you specified “localhost” (default is “localhost”) * port you specified “3306″ (default is 3306) * socket you specified “” (default is “”) The options my be specified on the command-line or in a ~/.mytop config file. See the manual (perldoc mytop) for… Continue reading »

Paragonhost has a very useful post on setting up custom PRM rules (Process Resource Monitor). I think this maybe the cause of so much load on one of my servers recently, as the exim process is getting killed early and not being allowed to finish a queue run – resulting in a backlog of mail on the queue and an ever decreasing circle (not good!). I’ve made a tweak and will see how it goes!

Did a little bit of Apache reading after a client query yesterday, it seems restarting httpd is not all that it seems! start – start httpd startssl – start httpd with SSL enabled stop – stop httpd restart – restart httpd if running by sending a SIGHUP or start if not running fullstatus – dump a full status screen; requires lynx and mod_status enabled status – dump a short status screen; requires lynx and mod_status enabled graceful – do a graceful restart by sending a SIGUSR1 or start if not running Is the normal course of events from apachectl, but what about if we want to restart with SSL? A route around this as sugeested by someone is to remove… Continue reading »

One way to check if magic_quotes is running is to run get_magic_quotes_gpc(). It will return a 1 if it is on, or a 0 if it is off. You can use this result to print out the magic_quotes status, or to decided if you should run another function, such as addslashes. Read more at http://www.psychicperformer.com < ?php if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()==1) { Print “Magic Quotes gpc is turned on” ; } else { Print “Magic Quotes gpc is turned off” ; } ?>

I had reason to go looking for this today, having not done it in a long, long time (thanks to the delightful cPanel interface). To change a password on behalf of a user, first sign on or “su” to the “root” account. Then type, “passwd user” (where user is the username for the password you are changing). The system will prompt you to enter a password. Passwords do not echo to the screen when you enter them. You can also change your own password, by typing “passwd” (without specifying a username). You will be prompted to enter your old password for verification, and then a new password.