Technology « brandondawson.org

25Dec/110

There’s more reasons to drop GoDaddy than their SOPA support. Here’s my GoDaddy horror story

This graph shows what relying on GoDaddy.com as my domain registrar did for my business.

This week the internet's dominant domain registrar, GoDaddy, angered the online community with its support for SOPA, a badly flawed piece of legislation that is being opposed by nearly every reputable online firm of any size.

I won't go into the many flaws of the laws Congress is considering, or the trail of entertainment industry money that's leading straight to the campaign coffers of Congresscritters. Interested parties can find that elsewhere.

What I want to do here is give my own first-hand account as to why you shouldn't do business with GoDaddy, above and beyond it's long track record of unethical behavior and tendency for in-your-face marketing practices.

Tagged as: Boycott, GoDaddy, SOPA Continue reading

9Jun/112

Remove Plesk Health Monitor

If you're tired of dealing with the obnoxious "Alarm Level Changed" e-mails that Plesk's Health Monitoring puts out, you can simply remove the package.

From shell:
rpm -e psa-health-monitor

After all, it's not like there aren't a billion better packages out there. (I recommend the stuff that R-fx Networks puts out, personally.)

Tagged as: Plesk 2 Comments

10Apr/110

Plesk 10 & open_basedir

To add a directory to a virtual domain's open_basedir in Plesk 10, simply add a vhost.conf to the conf/ directory of the vhost in question, then run:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/httpdmng --reconfigure-domain yourdomain.com

Your vhost.conf would need to be in the format of:

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/httpdocs>
php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/httpdocs:/tmp:/add/your/directory/here"
</Directory>

Filed under: Technology No Comments

7Mar/110

Don’t buy Parallels Plesk 10

I'd just like to take a brief moment to "thank" Parallels, makers of the Plesk Control Panel, from the bottom of my heart, for costing me several hundred dollars in lost time and money by springing their version 10 release on an unsuspecting world months before it was truly ready for production use.

I say "months" because they seem to have released it in late 2010, but it was still very, very broken when I attempted to upgrade, about ten days ago. Over the years, I'd stuck with Plesk because its user interface was much more attractive and user-friendly than its primary competitor, cPanel, which has a few issues of its own.

But the simple truth of the matter, the bottom line, is that this is hardly the first time Parallels has dropped an unproven upgrade, and let their customers serve as unpaid QA testers. This is not acceptable, and I doubt I'll be alone in pursuing alternative options on my next server build.

So as of the date of this post, I would very much encourage anyone still on the relatively-stable Plesk 9 to avoid Plesk 10 at all costs.

(And yes, I said "build" and not "lease": my server provider didn't exactly distinguish themselves in this debacle, either, but that's a subject for a whole 'nother post.)

Filed under: Business, Personal, Technology, Web Design No Comments

10Sep/100

Will 9th Circuit “First Sale” doctrine ruling boost F/OSS?

My first thought on the ruling, which upholds the end user license agreements that render software an object you don't own, was that this ruling was very wrong-headed. In the traditional sense, if you buy something, you own it, in every meaningful sense of the word, abstract legal notions be damned.

As they say, possession is nine tenths of the law.

But then, my second thought was that how many businesses are now going to be uncomfortable realizing they're paying for an asset they do not and cannot own?

Tagged as: 9th Circuit, First Sale Doctrine, FOSS Continue reading

23Jun/100

“Invalid Key” error for jos_session, jos_components, and jos_core_acl_aco tables in Joomla database

I ran into this one this evening, and at its root, it comes down to some changes made between MySQL 5.0 and 5.1.

Problem is, fixing the issues created by these changes seems to be more involved than the documentation implies. Suggested fixes such as commenting out the skip-bdb option in my.cnf did not work in this case.

After spending hours perusing support sites, and banging my head repeatedly against these tables that were being reported as "corrupt" and unrepairable, I finally hit upon a low-tech solution.

I downloaded the actual database files from /var/lib/mysql, tucked it into the /var/lib/mysql directory of a MySQL 5.0 install, exported the SQL queries and re-imported them into my 5.1 install.

This solution isn't for everyone, of course, because it requires access to a 5.0 install, but it worked for me.

Tagged as: corrupted database, invalid key, Joomla, jos_components, jos_core_acl_aco, jos_session, mySQL No Comments

27Apr/100

McAfee McAgent.exe

I've decided that the mcagent.exe process installed by McAfee's Total Protection 2010 would be more aptly named "McHippie.exe".

Why? Because it just sits around in a daze, doing nothing, while consuming all your resources.

Bah-rum-bump.

(With apologies to actual, honest-to-God, granola-eating hippies.)

Tagged as: antimcagent.exe, McAfee, McHippie No Comments

26Apr/100

Self-inflicted facepalm #97129

I just figured I'd drop a brief note here, for posterity, to assist others who fail to inspect their own .htaccess files to see if, perhaps, they've restricted access to only their IP address, and have embarked on a wild goose chase to track down an obscure "client denied by server configuration" error.

I spent an hour researching this issue this evening. The Googles present a wide variety of potential fixes, but it turns out that the real problem was that I'd outsmarted myself by restricting a particular directory to my old IP address via an .htaccess file.

Tagged as: .htaccess, Apache, errors No Comments

4Jan/100

Plesk SSO errors

A little tip here: If you're getting this message when trying to log into Plesk Billing via Plesk:

Warning: fopen(/var/log/sso/sso.log) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /usr/local/sso/lib/Log.php on line 24 FATAL ERROR: Can not open log file '/var/log/sso/sso.log' (CWD is /usr/local/sso)

This would seem to be being caused by changing the hostname, for which Plesk Billing generates an automatic self-signed SSL certificate for. Attempting to re-register the hostname using the /usr/local/psa/bin/sso utility is useless in this context, as it keeps beating up against the entrenched cert.

To remedy, simply:
1.) Back up your Plesk Billing database
2.) command: yum remove plesk-billing
3.) Re-add Plesk Billing via the Plesk Updater

Tagged as: Plesk No Comments

20Dec/090