Webservers

Published in a book

Ages ago I wrote a feature on how to backup a cpanel account. Just recently one of my clients purchased a dedicated server that uses cpanel as the website hosting manager. I purchased cpanelAric’s cpanel userguide and tutorial book to assist with learning some of the more obscure features and functions and as I was reading through the book I got to page 93 – and my site is quoted as a way to backup the system – how cool is that!
Naturally I now have to go back and make sure that the script still works and make any changes necessary.

oops – webpage redirects break a site.

I was moving a test site to a live site this morning and in doing so added a couple of redirect lines to the htaccess file/ mod rewrite installation to try and move any broken links to the main index.php page. Unfortunately this has somehow broken the website and now every single page ends up with a 302 which firefox displays as “Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.”
I’ve removed all the redirections that I can find but for some reason the website is still running the redirection as valid test html pages still get redirected to the php page and then the 302. I think I am going to have to wait until the webservice is restarted but I’ve logged a ticket in the meantime.

Download Squad broken

Oops – the Download Squad website is broken at the moment coming up with the error message “Microsoft VBScript compilation error ‘800a03e9’ Out of memory /b-c/design-43/posts.asp,line 0”. I’m not quite sure how you can have an error in line 0 of a web page but this does give you information on the structure of the website.
Interestingly, a google search shows that the problem is either a string/line which is over 1022 characters long or that you can’t have more than 64 for/next loops in a web page.

Mac troubles.

I went round a friends house on Tuesday night to teach them how to manage the church’s website which runs under Mambo (which I’m starting to regret installing!). Unfortunately this person only has mac’s in the house and doesn’t really know much about the technical side of a mac apart from using word, email and graphical/music packages. He wanted to install a copy of mambo onto his own mac so he could play without distrupting the live server. However mambo needs mysql, php and apache installed. Thankfully apache was already configured but php wasn’t working – it was just displaying the files as text files. However when I searched for httpd.conf it didn’t come back with any details – instead I had to open terminal, change to a directory in /etc and then vi the file – only to find it was readonly, owned by root and when I asked for the root password I was met with a blank stare. I then used netinfo (i think) to remove the asterix in the passwd file for root, changed the password, logged in, edited the httpd.conf and hey presto – php was working. Undo the root passwd setups and then onto mambo installation.
This worked ok until we got to the sql installation as although mysql was installed, we couldn’t find a frontend to configure the databases and couldn’t find anything in google…I thought Mac interfaces were meant to be really helpful and friendly? This one certainly wasn’t.

Anyway, we carried on with testing on the “live” site and discovered that we needed a way of uploading files, specifically mp3 files, to the mambo server but you can only seem to do this if you are the administrator of the server. Not much use for giving users the ability to upload certain files and pictures.
The next solution was to use ftp, so does anyone know a good, easy to use (gui), free, mac ftp client?
Alternatively anyone got any alternatives to running a cms website that allows registered users to upload files (like a blog). I might just start again with an installation of WordPress – might be easier.

Netcrafts WebServer survey 8th birthday

From Netcrafts survey, the first Web Server Survey ran in August 1995 and found 18,957 sites. NCSA and CERN were the leading web servers of the day, in front of Netscape which had recently IPO’d, and the Apache project which started a few months earlier in March 1995. Microsoft-IIS, HTTP/1.1 hosting and domain name registrars were not then on the horizon.

In the August 2003 survey we received responses from 42,807,275 sites.
(My first domain appeared in March 1999) although I was using geocities a longtime before that.