Category Archives: Hosting

Hosting info & reviews.

Webbynode Beta coming soon

For those who are:

  1. Into Linux & server management
  2. Interested in building fail over Linux VPS solutions
  3. Happy to play about creating your own hosting environment

This one might be for you…

Webbynode have a coming soon Beta. According to their blurb.

…the killer new flexible Xen VPS service for developers & for people in need of better hosting.

….advanced features to create clusters between webbys, iscsi San storage, amazon ec2, and more.

Sounds like it could be something worthwhile to test, can’t wait to have a go.

Permission denied: /.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file

If you ever see this in your Apache logs:

Permission denied: /path/to/web/data/html/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

Think permissions, permissions, permissions. If you have chmod’ed your .htaccess 644 or even 777 and it’s still not working, start traversing up your directory tree and make sure apache can access everything at each level.

Permissions required will depend on the exact server and software setup, but generally something like 755 (drwxr-xr-x) is probably a good start.

Centos 5.2 + Udev + XEN

So my first Centos 5.1 to Centos 5.2 upgrade on a VPS didn’t go so well.

After “yum update” and a reboot, we see:

[/sbin/fsck.ext3 (1) — /] fsck.ext3 -a /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate
superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193

Followed by:

Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D to continue):

How not very nice!
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Joomla error number 2006 MySQL server has gone away

I look after a number of servers in my spare time 🙂 One of the guys who I help out contacted me recently with a weird Joomla issue when trying to install a particular component.

* JInstaller::install: SQL Error. DB function failed with error
number 2006
MySQL server has gone away SQL=CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS
`jos_comprofiler` ( `id` int(11) NOT NULL default ‘0’, `user_id` int(11) NOT

Other modules and components would install fine, the only one failing to install was comprofiler, part of the Community Builder module for Joomla/Mambo. Other parts of the same module were also installing fine.
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Pingdom GIGRIB

Pingdom offer a commercial web site monitoring service, they also offer a free monitoring solution that you can join, GIGRIB.

Pingdom GIGRIB is a unique, distributed website monitoring service. GIGRIB users can add websites they want monitored, and in return their computers become a part of the GIGRIB monitoring network.

A while back I setup the GIGRIB client on the only Windows PC in the house and it seemed to run ok. I was contributing several thousands of checks a day to the project and monitoring a couple of sites I was interested in.
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