September 2007

Monthly Archive

SQL and backups. How do I do it?

Tom Whiting 18 Sep 2007 | : administration

Probably one of the most important things you will have to do in your life as a systems admin is BACKUPS. Typically, you can rsync things from A to B, and then reverse to restore. HOWEVER, there are certain things that this should never be done for. One of those very critical things is MySQL.
Continue Reading »

SQL - Is it optimized?

Tom Whiting 17 Sep 2007 | : administration

Running 2 webservers myself, both very intense in SQL services (what server isn’t any more?), I found that SQL can be ugly, it can be just downright ugly, especially when NOT optimized on a frequent basis. Today, I’ll go through a very simple trick and script to optimize your SQL databases. Doing this saves me 10-20 meg a day in backups.

Tomorrow, how to create daily SQL backups OUTSIDE of your control panel, and restore from them if necessary!
Continue Reading »

service httpd does not support chkconfig — How to fix?

Tom Whiting 08 Sep 2007 | : administration

So, on setting up a few new servers tonight for a client, I ran into the following error

[root@server ~]# rpm -e httpd httpd-suexec httpd-devel php php-pear php-devel php-imap
service httpd does not support chkconfig
error: %preun(httpd-2.0.52-32.3.ent.centos4.i386) scriptlet failed, exit status 1
[root@server ~]#

What happened here? This was a stock CentOS4 server (completely updated). How to resolve? Read more to find out.
Continue Reading »

Does YOUR ISP support insecure DNS? You’d be surprised to see which DO!

Tom Whiting 04 Sep 2007 | : administration

With CPanel 11 rolling out as stable, you’d be surprised to see the number of individuals I get with this response:
I can’t access CPanel/webmail/etc. When I try, I get the following error

The server was configured to not permit you access to the specified resource. If you believe this is in error or inadvertent, please contact the
system administrator and ask them to update the host access files.

Continue Reading »