Rock Creek Webs Network

I had an internal customer who was getting blocked from sending mail because their storage was exceeded. He had cleaned out his mail to the point that he was under limit but we still could not work past Exchange indicating he was over limit. I also tried setting it to an expanded level. This did not work. What did work was that I did a Restart in the Services for MS-Exchange Store. After that problem gone.

To back up a domain (Web site):

1. Go to Domains > domain name > Backup Manager (in the Files group).
2. Click Back Up.
3. Specify the following:
   • Backup file name prefix and description. You cannot specify an arbitrary file name, however, you can set the control panel to add a prefix to backup file names. Note that the control panel automatically adds the date and time of backup file creation (in Universal Time) to backup file names.
   • Splitting of the backup file. To create a multivolume backup, select the respective check box and specify volume size in megabytes.
   • Location where to store the backup file. Select the repository where you would like to store the backup file.
   • What data to back up. You can back up Web hosting settings, Web content, and e-mail accounts with e-mail messages.
   • E-mail notification on backup completion. If you want to send an e-mail notice on the backup completion, type the required e-mail address.
   • Suspend the Web site until backing up is finished. If you do not want anybody to make any changes to the site content or settings during backing up, select the corresponding check box.
4. Click Back Up. The backup process will start and the progress will be shown under the Current Back Up Tasks tab. You can use the Refresh button to update the information on the screen.
5. When backing up is finished, the backup file will be saved to the repository you selected, and will be accessible either from the FTP server, or from the location Domains > domain name > Backup Manager.

For whatever reason, or maybe I just don’t know the trick yet, but Plesk demands a real domain when creating a site. I had setup an online book catalog for our owner but after testing this out using  Joomla Media Library and everything seemed to work fine, well then it stopped. The errors I was getting indicated a SOAP error. This application relies on the Amazon Web Service. I thought it might be that Amazon had changed their methods for this.

Anyway it didn’t work and I wasn’t sure this was the best way to go with this so I suggest the owner try using WordPress. I felt it would handle the functions he needed and found an WordPress plugin to allow embedding Amazon info, called Amazon Showcase WordPress Plugin and direct the user to Amazon where we are setup as an associate.

I setup up a site with an unused domain of the company so that they could populate their blog with the book data. Then it was time to change the URL pointer of this site to the new one.

In Plesk I deleted the old site and setup renamed the new site using the temporary domain name. You do that by drilling down to the domain’s property pages and in the Domain Adminstration group at the bottom left hand side is Domain Administrator Access.

In the Preferences section you can choose to rename the site. This also changes the folder name of the file on the server. So by changing the domain from originalDomain.com to newDomain.com the folder will change likewise.

I’ve done this on a number of WordPress installs already but this time the links kept refering back to the original blog.

I found this handy fix on the Codex of WordPress where you define these lines in your wp-config.php.

Note: Do not copy and paste this. I just spent some time troubleshooting the white screen of death because of the characters in this sample.

define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://example.com’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://example.com’);

Be sure to leave off any trailing slashes. (don’t use http://example.com/)

I had this on at first and when making updates in the admin the page would return leaving the domain off and triggering site not found error. (URL looked like this http://wp-admin/yaddayadda/)

Boy Howdy! I’ve been having some fun here. My last post about changing the permission to allow an upgrade to 2.8.4 was the begining of the odyssey.  The automatic update indicated that it completed successfully however, when navigating to the site only blank pages would appear.

I tried looking into the wp-config.php and I could even pull up the readme.html from the update but no PHP pages. I tried renaming plugins and themes folders to see if i would work past this by avoiding a bug with the update.

The update did not overwrite any of the wp-content files so I had access to the themes, images and media from the original site.

I created another site with a spare domain in Plesk using the latest WordPress 2.8.4 and went through the process as though I was setting up a new WordPress install. I then took the database backup from the original site and imported that into the new site.

On this new site I was still only able to get blank pages. I had not moved my wp-content from the original site over to the new site yet. After doing this the site homepage would come up and the old site was replicated. However clicking on any link would lead to a blank page because I had not changed the setting of the new siter or turned off the old site from their domain pointers.

I suspened the original site pointed  the domain to the new sites IP and waiting for the change to propogate. After a couple hours I had restored my old site.

Warning: This is not for the faint of heart.

Update: I have run into this again updating 2.7 to 2.9 with the update function built into WordPress. Blank Pages the whole works. In doing a new reconstruction I had some problems with the data restore because of permissions and it would not allow me to create another instance of the database.

I had a site where i was having difficulties doing an automatic update of  WordPress install. The solution to work around this problem was to change permissions.

This Rock Creek Webs article covers changing permissions recursively on a directory.

In a Plesk 9 environment – go to Domains >> the domain you’re looking to backukp the database for >> Databases >> Webadmin

This will launch phpMyAdmin web based MySql interface.

Choose the database for the WordPress installation that is being backed up.

Click on the Export Tab

Check Add DROP TABLE in Structures,  Complete inserts in Data and Save as file with None for compression

The file will download to you computer

A more detailed offical instruction set can be found here.

http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups

I’ve had to deal with this issue a number of times so in case I need to again here the handy dandy solution.

The problem is that mail destined for bad recipients goes to the Badmail folder in mailroot. When SPAMMers impersonate senders using your domain this can fill quite quickly. Yesterday, I was confronted with a Badmail folder with almost half a million emails.

What to do?

I created another folder called Badmailnew. I took away all write permissions to this folder from the system.  In IIS in the SMTP properties you can select the folder you wish to use as Badmail. I pointed it to this new folder. Since the new folder does not allow the system to write the bad mail cannot be placed there.

I ran across a number of sites describing how to do this but none were working for me. They did all have parts of the puzzle.

You need to add the following values or whatever amount your looking to increase to a file called PHP5.INI and place this in the wp-admin folder of your WordPress install.

memory_limit = 100M
upload_max_filesize = 192M
post_max_size = 100M
file_uploads = On

Here’s a link to info on using the vi editor.

http://staff.washington.edu/rells/R110/#basics5

I was trying to setup a WordPressMU site and I needed to enable Wildcard DNS. I found some excellent resources on this at this page run by 1&1 hosting.

http://www.1and1faq.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-602.html

Some of the commands in SSH regarding the websrvmng confused me. The following page shows some  of the commands you can run on this program.

http://mattiasgeniar.be/2009/07/26/how-to-change-a-servers-main-ip-address-including-dns-records-in-plesk/

addendum:

I setup another WordPresMU site. I had problems using the site even after following the above instructions. The problem turned out to be that the first site DNS info was with Network Solutions who already had a CNAME record with the wildcard domain setup. The new one was being hosted by GoDaddy. This did not have a wildcard for sub-domains setup by default. I tried to setup a CNAME record but it was refused. I created an A name wildcard. That’s doing the trick.