How to install WordPress in Plesk 11.5
In this video I will show you the two ways of installing WordPress in Plesk 11.5: the “one-click” way and the “custom installer” way. Both options have their advantages: the first offers extremely fast deployment, and the other offers very fine grained control, all courtesy of the WordPress APS package. This screencast was inspired by a the on the Parallels Forum: http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?297448-Install-Wordpress-with-Plesk If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below, or add it...
read moreHow to allow passive FTP connections in Plesk on Amazon EC2
Passive FTP connections should work out of the box in Plesk. If no other firewall or NAT is interfering with it. I’ve recently noticed that when I install Plesk on Amazon EC2 every passive FTP connection fails with an error such as “Server sent passive reply with unroutable address. Passive mode failed.” The reason for this mishap is twofold: EC2 instances are behind a NAT, and therefore have an internal (unroutable) IP, and an external (public) IP. When a passive connection request comes in, ProFTP – Plesk’s...
read moreThe Postfix Cheat Sheet
I recently had some trouble with my postfix mail service. Not knowing where to being looking for log files and restart commands, I thought this quick cheat sheet would come in handy in the future: Starting and Stopping On CentOS we can speak to postfix like this: postfix start postfix stop postfix reload The this command re-reads the configuration files. Note that there is no restart command – you have to stop and then start the service again manually. Log Files On CentOS 6.5 I could find the log files in /var/log/maillog (that’s...
read moreHow to extend instance storage on Amazon EC2
I’ve just launched an EC2 instance from my own AMI. This time however I wanted it to have more storage so I increased the size of my disk space from 10 to 100GB. Once the instance had launched I’ve noticed that – as before – only 10GB was actually available. I’ve had this with other infrastructure before, and I knew that I had to extend the volume as well as the volume and the file system for the OS to recognise the extra space. df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/xvde1 9.9G 2.6G 6.9G 27% /...
read moreHow to use Bind Mounting in Linux
Bind Mounting allows us to make one directory accessible from more than one location. It’s like “intercepting” directory1 and making the system redirect requests to directory2. Let’s take a look how to set this up and why we may want to use this technique. Quick Refresher: Device Mounting Perhaps you’re familiar with mounting devices to the filesystem in Linux. Say you had a new USB stick or other volume available and you want to make this accessible to your filesystem. Here’s how you’d do that: mount...
read moreHow to change the default directory for backups in Plesk
By default the Backup Manager in Plesk stores local backups in /var/lib/psa/dumps. You can change this location by editing /etc/psa/psa.conf. Find the following block in the file: # Backups directory DUMP_D /var/lib/psa/dumps DUMP_TMP_D /tmp Change the path for DUMP_D to your new desired location, then restart Plesk for the changes to take effect: service psa stopall service psa restart Alternatively, if you don’t want to make the change, you can mount another volume to the default backup directory (such as an Amazon S3 Bucket).
read moreHow to install Apache mod_pagespeed on CentOS with Plesk
I bumped into Kristian Markroft from Simplyroot in New Orleans last week, and he told me about an interesting speed-up module for the Apache Webserver. mod_pagespeed is an open source project which speeds up page loads without having to change the code of the actual page. mod_pagespeed does this by adding filters before pages are served. For example it will resize images and minify CSS/JS files, which can speed up page load considerably. The project is hosted on Google Code: https://code.google.com/p/modpagespeed/ Let’s see how we can...
read moreHow to remove data from your iCloud Storage
Trouble backing up your device to iCloud? Is your storage constantly at the limit and you don’t know what to do about it? Fret not! In this video I will show you some option you have to deal with that dreaded message “Not enough iCloud Storage”. Essentially there are four things you can do to prevent this problem: buy more iCloud Storage backup less data (for example, don’t backup pictures) remove older iCloud backups (think of devices you no longer own) use less iCloud Document Storage (remove data from iMovie...
read moreGetting Started with ZEND Server 6 on Mac OS X
I’ve just installed ZEND Server 6.3 on my MacBook running Mavericks 10.9.1. Needless to say I’m sill a little shaken up from the huge amount of brain pain this adventure has caused. Because once downloaded and installed on your system, you may ask yourself a vital question: Now What? Let’s find out. This article is Work in Progress – bear with me while I flesh it out. The Basics ZEND Server on Mac is located here: /usr/local/zend/ Your web files live here: /usr/local/zend/apache2/htdocs To open this directory in Finder...
read moreCrash Course in BASH Script Programming a classic…
Crash Course in BASH Script Programming (a classic): http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html
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