How to kill the “accept incoming connections” dialogue on your Mac forever

Have you ever come across the above dialogue, asking if you’d like to “accept incoming network connections” on your Mac? It’s caused by the Firewall and it’s meant to be helpful. Because if you have an app that needs incoming network connections all the time, you can just add them to the Firewall rules (under … Read more

How to reset the PRAM (or NVRAM) on your Mac

On a recent chat with Apple support, the representative suggested I reset my PRAM. From what I understand this will clear BIOS like values that may cause a Mac to malfunction. It only takes a second to do – here’s how: Press CMD+OPTION+P+R, then start the system. You’ll need three hands or a portable keyboard … Read more

How to start Mac OS X Yosemite in Safe Mode

Hold down SHIFT during normal boot, until the loading bar appears. It will take longer than usual to start the system. Some services are not available. Safe Mode will clear several caches and verify the startup disks. From the command line, or on remote systems, boot into Safe Mode using this: sudo nvram boot-args=”-x” When … Read more

How to update Plesk via the Command Line

You can update Plesk via the Web Interface (under Tools and Settings – Updates and Upgrades). However sometimes the interface times out, or browsers get confused – therefore it’s good to know that you can apply updates via the command line interface as well. In this article I’ll show you how (in Linux – I … Read more

How to fix WordPress Media upload trouble caused by open_basedir restriction

I’ve recently migrated a WordPress site from one server to another (running Plesk) and noticed that file uploads were no longer working. All existing files showed up fine, but new uploads were always aborted with a message such as “Is your uploads directory writable?” – which of course it was. Here’s what it looked like – a … Read more

How to open SMTP port 587 to send emails in Plesk

By default Plesk on Linux uses Postfix for outgoing email, and by default listens on port 25 for outgoing SMTP mail. Some service providers do not allow to send emails on that port, and tragedy occurs: clients can’t send email with their Plesk servers. Not good. Other SMTP ports will usually work, such as the … Read more

What is the Prove your Humanity login feature in WordPress

Some of my clients have recently noticed a new math question on their WordPress login screen. It prompts to Prove your humanity in addition to your user name and password. This feature was recently introduced in Jetpack as part of the Protect Feature, which prevents hackers from trying to gain access to your WordPress site via … Read more

How to turn off all Plesk Health Monitor alert emails

I have previously described how to adjust the values that the Plesk Health Monitor uses to determine when an email should be sent out. There is also a way to switch these emails off entirely. Here’s how: To turn off the daemon that is responsible for sending these emails, issue this: /etc/init.d/psa-health-monitor-notificationd stop No more … Read more