I’ve had this issue before: you get a new server, the image is a few revisions behind the current release and your first line of business is to upgrade the system.
A few minutes later you check and find that Plesk refuses to start. Bugger. Now what?
My Customer Support Gurus always know what to do, but in an effort to not disturb them at night here’s what they did to make it all work again. These instructions work on a CentOS 5 system with Plesk 9.0.1 installed.
So I’ve expanded my server arsenal to a fifith machine with Strato in Germany. Sadly they only offer an OpenSUSE installation bundled with Plesk (in German – unchangeable to English).
What I really wanted was another CentOS system though, which Strato offer – but without Plesk installed.
After a bit of hackage, I found out that it’s very easy to install Plesk from the command line via the Parallel’s Auto Installer.
These instructions should work on any distribution of Linux – just make sure you download the right auto installer package from the Parallels site (you need to create an account with them and log in for this link to work).
Just when I though the Drunkjeans Hack had passed over, there’s another attack on a couple of my sites. I’ll call it the “Comber 38” hack. These hacks are most likely related.
With Comber 38, your sites are turned into Viagra Promo sites. Search for “viagra hack” and you’ll see how common this problem is.
Even though your home page may still work, the hackers use your site as a storage for images that can be pulled in from other sites, hence poncing off your server’s bandwidth.
If these files are linked to, your site is redirecting to some viagra site. It gioves the hackers and spammers direct link to a clean site rather than having to use their spam domains directly. If it wouldn’t be so evil, you ould argue it’s a pretty bright idea…
In fact, here’s what’s in one of those files:
Saturday morning a couple of my sites were hacked by something I’ve not found a lot of info about. I’ll call it The Drunkjeans Hack. I’ve also found this being inserted from other domains (see below).
Some idiot has inserted a piece of code into the main index.php file that looks like this:
The first line calls a JavaScript file on the given domain, while the second line is a unique identifier (consider yourself an individual).
What this thing does is unclear, but depending on how far the hackers get with this, it could be anything from a wonky homepage to the entire site being down. I did some digging and here’s what I found out:
I’m as excited as a kid in a candystore! I’ve heard a lot about HyperDB and what can be done with it, and I’ve been thinking how cool it would be to implement it on the sites I’m hosting. And today my friends I’m proud to say that IT WORKS A TREAT!
Let me tell you a bit about HyperDB. It’s another super cool Automattic project fronted by Matt, Andy, Ryan and Blogluftwaffe. It’s a rather complex plugin for WordPress that will let you specify more than one Database Server. In a high production environment your one and only Database Server can get busy or even crash and die – so all websites would be down until you restart it.
HyperDB solves this by letting you specify several servers in the handy db-config.php file. You can set one as master server for write queries and several others for read queries. This means that the master server doesn’t get bothered with read queries while several other servers can deal with those. If one read server dies, the others can pick up the slack. It’s genius!
Before a general roll-out to live sites a little test might be an idea. Currently I have three servers at my disposal and a dev site for testing. All servers are running CentOS 5 in a mixture of 32-bit and 64-bit installations, with Plesk 9.3/9.5 on them. Here’s my setup:
Since phpMyAdmin is written in php, all we need to do is change the file upload limit in the php.ini file. On CentOS and RHEL distributions, this file is located in /etc/php.ini Find this section: ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; File Uploads ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Whether to allow HTTP file uploads. file_uploads = On ; Temporary directory for … Read more
Fellow WordPressers,
Looks like the big news just broke – WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” is here (that’s named after Jazz pianist Thelonious Monk by the way). You may have seen an upgrade notice in your dashboard already that urges you to upgrade.
Which is why I thought I’d drop you a message:
This is especially important to users of the WP Ecommerce Plugin, which IS NOT compatible with WordPress 3.0 (I’m thinking of Davey Lee from Western Straia here). Trust me, I’ve tried it on my Beta Site. It’s all tears and no joy from there.
Alex Rabe’s NextGen Gallery plugin is certainly the best there is, even though I find it a tad too complex at times. I love it though, and I use it on all my sites whenever I want to upload a batch of pictures and insert them into my posts with little hassle and great convenience.
One thing that bugs me though is the message that reads
[View with Piclens] above my thumbnails, which gives the viewer a chance to see my gallery as a slideshow. It’s a great feature.
Trouble is, nobody actually knows what PicLens is or what it does – including myself, let alone my readers.
Lucky for us, it’s fairly easy to fix – let me show you how:
