HELM, WHM/cPanel, Windows, Linux, web hosting talk, Search Engine Optimization, PHP, ASP discussion blog

AccuWebHosting.com Joins Hands With SmarterTools, Inc.

Kailash — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:10:23 +0000

AccuWebHosting.com, a leading Windows VPS Hosting provider, is proud to announce its new partnership with software developer SmarterTools Inc.

The partnership will give AccuWebHosting.com’s Windows VPS and dedicated server customers a new and more improved range of services by providing the SmarterBundle at no additional cost.

“This partnership allows our company to offer SmarterTools’ world-class mail server solutions, powerful and feature-rich customer service helpdesk system, and comprehensive web log analytics software at no additional cost to our customers,” said Rahul C. Vaghasia, managing director for AccuWebHosting.com.

The SmarterBundle is valued at $800 and includes:

SmarterMail 7.x (250 mailboxes) - SmarterMail 7.x delivers cutting edge features and performance. Along with superior stability, it also has the ability to protect mailboxes from 97% of spam out-of-the-box.

SmarterStates 5.x (50 sites) – SmarterStats 5.x is a Web log analytics and SEO software solution that enables users to obtain detailed analysis of web traffic, visitors’ behavior, SEO marketing efforts, etc. This robust analytical tool is both user-friendly and efficient

SmarterTrack 5.x (2 agents) – SmarterTrack 5.x is a powerful customer help desk system that is integrated with multiple service solutions in a single application.

“The SmarterTools software bundle not only provides a significant value and resource to our clients, but it also equips them, with what we clearly believe, is the very best technology and services available for this particular need,” Vaghasia added.

About AccuWebHosting.com
AccuWebHosting.com has been providing world class web hosting services to the global community for nearly the past decade. Priding ourselves in providing innovative technology coupled with top notch customer service, this credo has allowed not only us, but our customers to experience success and substantial growth.

About SmarterTools Inc.
Founded in 2003, SmarterTools Inc. is an information technology management software company based in Phoenix, Arizona. SmarterTools develops a Windows mail server, customer service software, and Web log analytics and SEO software that help companies communicate, measure, and support their worldwide business operations. Additional information about SmarterTools Inc. and the SmarterTools product line is available at www.smartertools.com.

Munin MySQL monitoring graph is not updating or blank

Kailash — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 04:41:44 +0000

Munin is a monitoring tool used to monitor the performance of computers/servers, networks, SANs, applications, databases, weather measurements and other parameters. Munin remembers and records information it captured and presents them in graphs through a web interface. On cPanel/WHM server, you can easily install it from plugin section.

After successful installation, Munin will start colleting required data and will show you the graphs, including MySQL nodes such as MySQL throughputs, MySQL queries, MySQL Slow Queries, and MySQL threads. However, if you restart the server, Munin will fail to monitor MySQL nodes and it will stop showing graphs for MySQL.

The error is due to a bug in a Perl library Munin uses which causes $PATH variable to be lost, and then causes the plugin cannot find the mysqladmin program which it needs to retrieve the numbers to populate in the graphs. Uninstall and reinstall Munin Service Monitor may make it works again, however, a more permanent solution is to hardcode the path of the program, which will fix the problem. Following is the guideline to specify the path to mysqladmin to Munin.

Fix for Munin installed by cPanel/WHM

1. Find the path where mysqladmin is installed using one of the following commands:

which mysqladmin
type mysqladmin
locate mysqladmin

The above command will return a path to mysqladmin (i.e. /usr/bin/mysqladmin)

2. Edit Munin configuration file /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/cpanel.conf and modify the [mysql*] as below:

[mysql*]
user root
group wheel
env.mysqladmin /usr/bin/mysqladmin
env.mysqlopts –defaults-extra-file=/root/.my.cnf

Ensure the env.mysqladmin value is path returned by step 1. Also ensure that /root/.my.cnf contains correct MySQL root password.

3. Restart Munin service:

/etc/init.d/munin-node restart

4. Wait a while for MySQL statistics to be gathered, and check the graphs again.

Fix for the host or server without cPanel Control Panel:

Simply add the “env.mysqladmin /usr/bin/mysqladmin” (ensure that the path is correct according to your system) to the /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/munin-node file will do the trick.

How to get more Twitter Followers

Kailash — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 05:39:08 +0000

1. Follow other people

If you follow 100 twitter users and consider 50% will follow back, you will get 50 twitter followers and if you keep on doing that on a consistent basis you can have thousands of Twitter followers in short period. Please note that you can follow maximum 1000 followers in a day and you can follow maximum 2000 followers. Then after the limit is increased based on the ratio of followers and following. To keep followers and following ratio to 1:1, you will have to un-follow users who are not following you.

2. Get Verified Twitter account

This is the easiest way if you are a celebrity or a well known personality; apply to get verified twitter account.

3. Get listed on Popular Lists

If your twitter account is listed in popular list, you may get thousand of twitter followers on short time. Try to get on the lists and get more followers.

4. Get Suggested on Twitter

Earlier if you can manage to get on the Twitter suggested users list in any way, you would never have to look for twitter followers. You will gain thousands of twitter followers per day. How to get into the Twitter Suggested is a well kept secret.

5. Share Your Exclusive Deals and coupon

This one is useful for companies who want to disclose secret coupon codes, promo codes or exclusive discounts only on Twitter. The targeted people will follow you to get the benefit of your deal.

6. Offer Gifts to your followers

If I say I will give one $100 Google Adword credit to a random new Twitter follower who joins me over the next week, don’t surprise if you get a few thousands followers. Of course you will have to be genuine and give out the credit too.

No related posts.

LovingTech forum for Sale – BIG PROFITS TO BE MADE

Kailash — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 05:06:35 +0000

Ryan (current administrator of LovingTech.net) wishes to step down as admin and therefore sell LovingTech. Forum has around 40000 posts and 5500 threads. There are 2000+ registered members in the forum. You can bid at Flippa:

$1426 REV – 40,000 POSTS! Bespoke Webmaster / Tech Forums BIG PROFITS TO BE MADE

More details about LovingTech:

[1] Google PageRank: 3
[2] Alexa Rank: 170,575
[3] Links in Google: 42
[4] Links in Yahoo: 12,607
[5] Listed in DMOZ directory
[6] Claimed Traffic: Page Views Per Month – 40000, Unique Per Month – 10000

Why this forum is a great opportunity?

- Financially rewarding topic/subject
- Fantastic content, rich niche

How will the site make money?

- Adverts sold on a per-forum basis
- “Sticky thread” advertisements
- Contextual advertising
- Text links

Sticky threads are forum threads that the user has paid a fixed price per month to have their thread sticky.

Imagine a marketplace where everyone will go out of their neck to get best coverage and thus pay extra. Unfortunately LovingTech never looked for advertisers as it was a non-profit site, but they privately asked LovingTech to which it made sense to cover any costs we had. Please refer to the main revenue section.

You can place your bid at Flippa

Unlimited Disk Space and Unlimited Bandwidth hosting – is this scam?

Kailash — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:27:37 +0000

Nowadays, many web hosting companies offer unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth in their shared hosting plans. Is it really possible to allocate unlimited disk space and bandwidth on a shared server? Absolutely NOT. If it is really possible then why there are no unlimited disk space and bandwidth plans for VPS hosting or Dedicated server?

Most of the web hosting companies put the restrictions in such a way; you can’t use the more disk space and bandwidth.

How to restrict the Disk space usage:
Almost every web hosting companies who are offering unlimited disk space set the restriction on inode usage. An inode is a data structure which contains information about a regular file, folder such as its size and owner. For more details on inode, refer our article “What is an inode?”. Generally, one file uses one inode. For example, if a web hosting company has set 50000 inode limits that mean you can keep maximum 50000 files/folders in your account. If you have many email accounts or images, you can easily exceed this limit. If your account exceeds their inode limit, your account will be suspended or terminated by them without availability of backup. Also, many web hosting companies put restriction on backup as well. If your account exceeds half of the allocated inode limit, it will be removed from their backup system.

How to restrict the Bandwidth usage:
Any web hosting companies can put the restriction on bandwidth usage using the following ways:

[1] Restrict total processes per user
It is quite possible to set this limit and if your account exceeds allowed process limit, the visitors will start receiving errors on your web site which is not at all good for your web site and you may lose the traffic.

[2] Throttle the bandwidth per Virtualhost and set allowed connections per IP address
There are many modules (i.e. mod_cband for Apache etc.) available to throttle the bandwidth usage per Virtualhost. It is also possible to set allowed connection per IP address.

Also, many web hosting companies do not allow large video files as well as flash files.

It is advisable to go through the terms or service before you sign up for such web hosting plans or you can go for limited disk space and bandwidth web hosting plans instead.

How to reset Joomla administrator password

Kailash — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 13:42:51 +0000

Joomla’s administrator password can be changed with a simple MySQL query. Go to your cPanel and click on phpMyAdmin in the Databases box or access your MySQL database using the interface provided by your web hosting company.

We will consider that you have phpMyAdmin to manage your MySQL databases. In phpMyAdmin, select your Joomla database from the drop-down menu at left. The page will refresh and the database’s tables will be displayed at right side. Open the SQL tab (from the top navigation bar).

In the text field write the following SQL query:

UPDATE `jos_users` SET `password` = MD5( ‘new_password’ ) WHERE `jos_users`.`username` = “administrator” ;

“new_password” – replace this with the password you wish to set.
“administrator” – replace this if your admin username is different.

Once you are ready, click on the “GO” button to submit the query. If everything goes well, you should be able to login to Joomla with the new password.

These instructions are valid both for Joomla 1.0.* and Joomla 1.5.

If you have any questions related to Joomla, just ask your questions in our webmaster forum.

How to reset vBulletin administrator password

Kailash — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 13:18:12 +0000

The following guideline will help you to reset your vBulletin administrator in an event when “Forgot password” doesn’t work for you:

[1] Browse your forum and log out (if you have logged in using other user) if you aren’t already. Register as a new user and login as this user.

[2] In the vBulletin’s .zip file you can find a directory called ‘do_not_upload/‘. Inside this directory, there is a file called ‘tools.php‘. Upload this file into your forum’s admincp/ directory. Then go to the admincp/tools.php with your browser.

[3] At the bottom of the tools page is an option to ‘Reset Admin Access‘. Run it with the just newly registered username.

[4] You have just made yourself admin and you need this because you should now login to the admincp/ and find the user who’s password you have lost. Search for this user and when found you will see the whole profile including a password field. Set a new password.

[6] Go to the main forum and log out from the new user, and try to login with the old admin account. This should work now.

[7] When it works, go back into the admin control panel and find the newly registered user. The profile page will have a drop down in the top, from there select delete and delete the temporary admin.

[8] Then delete the tools.php file from your web hosting account. It is a potential security risk if you leave it on the web site.

The above steps will help you to reset admin password for vBlletin 3.x version.

If you have any questions related to vBulletin, just ask your questions in our webmaster forum.

Enable “Update now” link in AwStats on cPanel server

Kailash — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 08:54:46 +0000

To enable the manual statistics update (“Update now” link) in Awstats, you should edit the following configuration file:

[1] Open the following file:

tmp/awstats/awstats.yourdomain.com.conf (substitute yourdomain.com with your actual domain name)

[2] Look for the following line:

AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=0

Change the above value to 1:

AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=1

[3] Save your configuration file.

If you have any questions related to cPanel, just ask your questions in our webmaster forum.

What is an inode?

Kailash — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 04:53:19 +0000

An inode is a data structure which contains information about a regular file, folder such as its size and owner. The number of inodes you use represents the number of files/folders you have on your web hosting account. Many web hosting companies restrict the inode usage on the shared hosting server. Hence, even if they offer unlimited disk space, you cannot use it because of inode limit.

When a file is opened, the file’s inode is read by the kernel. If you have more files/folder in your account, the more inodes you use. Generally one file uses one inode.

As shared hosting customers, you may receive the notification regarding inode usage from your hosting provider. Generally the web site contents do not require more inodes. In most cases, catch-all account consumes more inode. You can delete/download emails from your catch-all email account to reduce the inode usage and if you do not require catch-all account, it is advisable to disable it. Also, if your account has many email accounts, it is advisable to download the emails via email client software viz. Outlook, Thunderbird etc.

This server version is not supported. Only servers up to Microsoft SQL server 2005 are supported

Kailash — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 05:29:50 +0000

You may receive the following error while connecting to SQL Server 2008 from Visual Studio 2008:

“This server version is not supported. Only servers up to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 are supported”

This error can be easily resolved by just installing Service pack. You can download service pack from here. Once you install the service pack, you should not face any problem.

Bug in Mailman version 2.1.12.cp3 message on cPanel server

Kailash — Wed, 12 May 2010 05:14:03 +0000

You might have received the following error while accessing your mailing list after recent cPanel update:

———————————–
Bug in Mailman version 2.1.12.cp3

We’re sorry, we hit a bug!

Please inform the webmaster for this site of this problem. Printing of traceback and other system information has been explicitly inhibited, but the webmaster can find this information in the Mailman error logs.
———————————–

In most cases, the above error was occurred due incorrect permissions set for mailman directory. You can run following command to change the permissions via SSH:

chmod 02775 -R /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/

Hopefully this will resolve your issue. If the problem persists, you can open a ticket with cPanel support. They should help you to resolve this.

$4 hosting – Host up to three web sites + free domain registration + cPanel Fantastico

How to enable Silverlight in IIS 6

Kailash — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 06:21:02 +0000

Silverlight is not enabled by default in IIS 6 web server. We require adding Silverlight MIME types manually in IIS6. To enable Silverlight for any web site hosted in IIS6, you will require adding the following three MIME types from IIS6:

Extension: .xap
Content Type: application/x-silverlight-app

Extension: .xaml
Content Type: application/xaml+xml

Extension: .xbap
Content Type: application/x-ms-xbap

Following are the exact steps to add MIME types in IIS6:

- Open IIS Manager.
- Expand your server name and then expand “Web Sites”.
- Right click on your web site name and go to “Properties”.
- Go to “HTTP Headers” tab and click on “File Types” which is under “MIME Map”.
- Click on “New Type” button to add new MIME type.
- Enter the extension and content type. Click “Ok” button to add it.

Silverlight Hosting + Free Domain Registration in $4

PHP Error Class XsltProcessor not found

You must use the Role Management Tool to install or configure Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

Kailash — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 04:35:30 +0000

If you are using Windows 2008 R2 operating system, you may receive the following error while installing Visual Studio 2008 or .NET Framework on your server:

You must use the Role Management Tool to install or configure Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

This is because Windows 2008 R2 comes with pre-installed .Net Framework 3.5.1. You just require to enable this feature from “Server Manager”.

Using Role management tool, you can easily enable .Net 3.5 framework on your web hosting server or development server.

Affordable Windows Hosting just $4 + FREE Domain Registration + ASP.Net Hosting

WHM error while adding IP address – Skipping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx already added

Kailash — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:45:13 +0000

Recently, I faced a problem to add an IP address from WHM. I received the following error while adding an IP address:

All Requested Ips were already active
System has 0 free ips.
Skipping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx .. already added

But when I checked in IP Functions -> Show/Edit Reserved IPs, it was not listed in it. To resolve this I followed the below steps:

[1] Checked chkconfig for ipaliases:
I checked chkconfig for ipaliases and it was on for 2, 3, 4, 5.

chkconfig –list ipaliases

[2] Restarted ipaliases service:
After checking chkconfig, I restarted ipaliases service using following command:

/etc/init.d/ipaliases restart

This did the trick and all IP addresses were displaying again on Show/Edit Reserved IPs page.

- Kailash Aghera

phpBB 3.0.7 security vulnerability

Kailash — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:28:31 +0000

Recently, phpBB 3.0.7 was released by phpbb.com. They discovered a new security vulnerability in phpBB 3.0.7 version which was not noticed during testing. Following is the original announcement:

——————————————————————
We are sorry to announce the immediate release of phpBB 3.0.7-PL1 to address a security issue which was introduced in 3.0.7, unfortunately the issue wasn’t noticed during testing and has only surfaced a week
after the release of 3.0.7.

We promised working feeds for phpBB 3.0.7. Sadly, we were not able to deliver on that promise – a critical bug in the permission handling for feeds slipped past. To all people who already have updated to 3.0.7, it
is of critical importance to update to 3.0.7-PL1. Otherwise, it is possible for users to bypass permission settings under the following circumstances:

- Feeds are enabled
- Any of the posts or topics feeds are enabled
- The unauthorised user – or one of the groups they are a member of – has forum permissions set on a private forum
- If you have excluded a forum from the list of forums that provide feeds, it is unaffected

The fix for the issue is a single line change inside of feed.php, line 525 has changed from:

$forum_ids = array_keys($auth->acl_getf('f_read'));

to:

$forum_ids = array_keys($auth->acl_getf('f_read', true));

There were no other changes, in particular neither style nor language changes.

——————————————————————
If you are using phpBB 3.0.7 it is strongly recommend to upgrade it immediately to to phpBB 3.0.7-PL1 version.

Affordable PHPbb Hosting

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PHP Error Class XsltProcessor not found

Kailash — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:12:23 +0000

If you receive an error “Class ‘XsltProcessor’ not found” in your website then it means that XSL extension is not installed on your server. You will require installing PHP XSL extension.

Error: Fatal error: Class ‘XsltProcessor’ not found in /path/to/filename.php on line XXX

Depending on the server platform / operating system, the installation method may differ.

If you are using cPanel control panel, you will require to recompile your Apache and PHP to enable this PHP extension.

If you have any questions related to web hosting or cPanel/WHM, you can submit it in our webmaster forum.

Links are added automatically in the index page of the website – adsttnmq1/sdioyslkjs2 attack

Kailash — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:39:52 +0000

Recently I faced problem with one of the websites in which there were many links added automatically in the index page. The FTP password was reset many times but it didn’t fix the problem. Even there was no logs for FTP access for this website.

After checking all the files/folders of this website, I found some suspicious files in one folder. There was a PHP script along with other files which was adding the spam links in the homepage. The script was simply called by attacker and they were passing some text file as a query string.

This is not an attack on the website but it seems they were adding the links just to populate their keywords in the search engine. I was not sure from where these malicious files were uploaded but after removing these files, I have not faced the problem again.

Just for the information, the link code was started using tag.

Prevent the user nobody from sending email from cPanel server

Kailash — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 07:11:41 +0000

If you are running PHP script as an Apache user on cPanel server, it is difficult to find the account if someone sends large amount of emails via PHP script. It is due to the fact that all emails will be sent as a nobody user. cPanel provides settings to block emails which are sent via nobody user. To enable this option, follow the below steps:

- Login to your WHM.

- Go to Server Configuration -> Tweak Settings.

- Select option “Prevent the user “nobody” from sending out mail to remote addresses (PHP and CGI scripts generally run as nobody if you are not using PHPSuexec and Suexec respectively.)” and save it.

Please note if PHP processes are running as a nobody user and you enable above option, your clients will not be able to send emails outside their domains using PHP mail() function.

Kailash Aghera

Wordpress and mod_security2 issues

Kailash — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:24:19 +0000

ModSecurity is an open source web application firewall. This helps to prevent attacks on websites, SQL injection, command execution via browser etc. However, this may break some application installed in your website. With ModSecurity2, you can not bypass any rule by ID from your .htaccess file.

If your web hosting provider has enabled mod_security with Apache, you may face some problem to post topic, upload images, insert images in the post etc. Since ModSecurity2 does not allow to bypass rules by ID via .htaccess, you will have to contact your web hosting provider to bypass some rules for your website. ModSecurity provides facility to bypass rules based on the location. You will require to create global whitelist configuration file to bypass certain rules based on the location.

Recently, I faced problem to upload and insert images in the post. After reading some websites, I found some global rules which I bypassed some ModSecurity rules using global whitelist configuration file which fixed my problem. The rules that I bypassed are as follow (I have put space before LocationMatch and /LocationMatch. Remove that space in your configuration file):

< LocationMatch "/wp-admin/post.php"> SecRuleRemoveById 300015 300016 300017 950907 950005 950006 960008 960011 960904 SecRuleRemoveById phpids-17 SecRuleRemoveById phpids-20 SecRuleRemoveById phpids-21 SecRuleRemoveById phpids-30 SecRuleRemoveById phpids-61 < /LocationMatch>

< LocationMatch “/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php”>
SecRuleRemoveById 300015 300016 300017 950907 950005 950006 960008 960011 960904
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-17
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-20
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-21
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-30
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-61
< /LocationMatch>

< LocationMatch “/wp-admin/page.php”>
SecRuleRemoveById 300015 300016 300017 950907 950005 950006 960008 960011 960904
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-17
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-20
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-21
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-30
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-61
< /LocationMatch>

< LocationMatch “/wp-admin/options.php”>
SecRuleRemoveById 300015 300016 300017 950907 950005 950006 960008 960011 960904
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-17
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-20
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-21
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-30
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-61
< /LocationMatch>

< LocationMatch “/wp-admin/theme-editor.php”>
SecRuleRemoveById 300015 300016 300017 950907 950005 950006 960008 960011 960904
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-17
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-20
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-21
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-30
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-61
< /LocationMatch>

< LocationMatch “/wp-includes/”>
SecRuleRemoveById 960010 960012 950006
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-17
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-20
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-21
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-30
SecRuleRemoveById phpids-61
< /LocationMatch>

Hope this will help others who are facing the similar problem in their Wordpress blog with mod_security.

Kailash Aghera

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How To Start/Restart/Stop iptables and auto start at boot

Kailash — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:49:42 +0000

You can use the following commands to start/restart/stop iptables on your Linux server:

To start iptables:
service iptables start

To stop iptables:
service iptables stop

To restart iptables:
service iptables restart

You can determine whether iptables is running or not using following command:

service iptables status

You can also configured iptables to start automatically on boot. You will need to use chkconfig command to turn it on:

chkconfig iptables on

To use above commands, you will need the root access of your server.

Kailash