How to start Mac OS X Yosemite in Safe Mode
Hold down SHIFT during normal boot, until the loading bar appears. It will take longer than usual to start the system. Some services are not available. Safe Mode will clear several caches and verify the startup disks. From the command line, or on remote systems, boot into Safe Mode using this: sudo nvram boot-args="-x" When you want to boot into “normal” mode again, change the startup parameters to nothing: sudo nvram boot-args="" Very handy article from the Apple Knowledge Base:...
read moreHow to update Plesk via the Command Line
You can update Plesk via the Web Interface (under Tools and Settings – Updates and Upgrades). However sometimes the interface times out, or browsers get confused – therefore it’s good to know that you can apply updates via the command line interface as well. In this article I’ll show you how (in Linux – I don’t know much about running Plesk on Windows I’m afraid). We need to download the standard installer script for this. It’s a powerful little tool which can also be used to add or remove...
read moreHow to fix WordPress Media upload trouble caused by open_basedir restriction
When I’ve recently migrated a WordPress site from one server to another (running Plesk) and noticed that file uploads were no longer working. All existing files showed up fine, but new uploads were always aborted with a message such as “Is your uploads directory writable?” – which of course it was. Here’s what it looked like – a familiar sight for anyone with WordPress issues: Uploads had been working fine on the pervious server, and other sites on the new server didn’t have a problem. Puzzles like...
read moreHow to open SMTP port 587 to send emails in Plesk
By default Plesk on Linux uses Postfix for outgoing email, and by default listens on port 25 for outgoing SMTP mail. Some service providers do not allow to send emails on that port, and tragedy occurs: clients can’t send email with their Plesk servers. Not good. Other SMTP ports will usually work, such as the other favourite 587 – but by default, Postfix is not listening on this port for email submissions – at least not in Plesk 12.0.8 on CentOS 7. Here’s how to enable port 587 such such ventures: Open the Postfix...
read moreWhat is the Prove your Humanity login feature in WordPress
Some of my clients have recently noticed a new math question on their WordPress login screen. It prompts to Prove your humanity in addition to your user name and password. This feature was recently introduced in Jetpack as part of the Protect Feature, which prevents hackers from trying to gain access to your WordPress site via brute-force attacks. Prove your humanity means that bots have a hard time logging in. You can even see how many times Jetpack has prevented unsuccessful login attempts. To remove the math question you can whitelist your...
read moreHow to turn off all Plesk Health Monitor alert emails
I have previously described how to adjust the values that the Plesk Health Monitor uses to determine when an email should be sent out. There is also a way to switch these emails off entirely. Here’s how: To turn off the daemon that is responsible for sending these emails, issue this: /etc/init.d/psa-health-monitor-notificationd stop No more emails until you restart the server, when the daemon will be resumed. If you don’t want that, switch it off at boot time using chkconfig psa-health-monitor-notificationd off To remove the...
read moreHow to fix Apache/NGINX trouble after restarting your Plesk server
Some of my servers have a weird habit of throwing an Apache error after a restart: NGINX is running fine, but Apache can’t start and all websites are down. I have no idea why some servers do it and some do not. But when they do, it’s just plain annoying. Here are two ways to fix this problem. Restart Apache gracefully The quickest option is to shutdown NGINX, restart Apache, tell it to shutdown gracefully and then bring up NGINX again. Here are the commands that will work on CentOS 7: systemctl stop nginx.service systemctl restart...
read moreHow to setup Plesk Mail in Mozilla Thunderbird for Windows
In this video I’ll show you how to setup Plesk Mail in Thunderbird for Windows. Unlike most email clients, Thunderbird can figure out the correct settings by itself – something neither Outlook nor Mac Mail can do. Therefore, the real magic with Thunderbird is figuring out how to get to the account settings. To do so, click the three little lines next to the search box. It will bring up a fly-out menu. Under Options – Account Settings, setup a new account or change the settings for an existing one. Thunderbird is clever...
read moreHow to setup Plesk Mail in Microsoft Outlook for Windows
In this video I’ll show you how to setup Plesk Mail in Microsoft Outlook on Windows. It’s often a big stumbling block for users. The instructions will also work for Microsoft Essentials, the predecessor of Outlook Express. I’m using Outlook 2010 here, but the instructions are also applicable to later versions. The two important windows are under Account Settings, there’s a window with six tabs. One of which is labelled Outgoing Server and the other one is called Advanced: Make sure Outlook is set to use TLS for...
read moreLAMP Stack for Humans – now available on Amazon
My new book LAMP Stack for Humans is now available on Amazon. It this 284 page guide I’ll walk you through the process of turning an old laptop into an always-on server. You can use it to run web applications in the comfort of your own home or office – no “cloud” required. Together we will configure the entire server: you will learn how to install CentOS, Apache, PHP and MySQL (or MariaDB) and WordPress. I will show you how you can reach your server from other computers on the network and how to create regular backups....
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