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When Urchin’s task scheduler fails, you’ll notice big gaps in your data within Urchin.

One question I hear quite often is “how do I add IP aliases in FreeBSD?

Using the InnoDB engine can be tricky due to the ibdata files’ rather untraditional behavior.

MySQL documentation can be awfully flaky - extremely verbose on issues that don’t require such verbosity, and then extremely terse on issues that need a lot of explanation.

Plesk has a (somewhat annoying) default firewall configuration that you can adjust from within the Plesk interface.

If you need a quick self-signed certificate, you can generate the key/certificate pair, then sign it, all with one openssl line:

This error means that Plesk attempted to make a DNS change and reload named, but it failed.

If you’ve used Plesk with a large amount of domains, you know what a pain running out of file descriptors can be.

These two commands will enable SpamAssassin for all users on a Plesk 8 server:

Add to /etc/make.

With portinstall:

It can be best to upgrade FreeBSD in an offline state, but if you do it online, you can do it like this:

Making Java keystores at the same time as you create a CSR and key is pretty easy, but if you have a pre-made private key that you want to throw into a keystore, it can be difficult.

If you find yourself stuck with over 30,000 files in a directory (text files in this example), packing them into a tar file can be tricky.

If you want to make a quick bookmark that will automatically log yourself into Plesk, make this bookmark:

Enabling submission port support for Postfix is really easy.

Sometimes servers just have the weirdest SSL problems ever.

One of the main reasons people like passive FTP is that it’s easier to get through firewalls with it.

Depending on your situation, it may be handy to redirect e-mails that have a certain subject line before it even reaches a user’s inbox.

Table corruption in MySQL can often wreak havoc on the auto_increment fields.

If you have postfix installed with OpenSSL support compiled in, you can enable SSL connections by editing two configuration files.

In some situations, the system time zone will be different than the one in MySQL, even though MySQL is set to use the system time zone.

If this situation pops up in Plesk, it means that a user has changed their MySQL password outside of Plesk.

If you want to remove all of the open_basedir restrictions for all sites in Plesk, simply create a file called /etc/httpd/conf.

If you want to get a really basic, wide-open for localhost setup for SNMP, just toss the following into /etc/snmp/snmpd.

If you find that /dev/null is no longer a block device, and it causes issues during init on Red Hat boxes, you will need to follow these steps to return things to normal:

If you find yourself with the ever-so-peculiar 500 OOPS error from vsftpd when you attempt to login over SSH, there could be a few different things at play.

If you want to adjust how long e-mails will spend in the qmail queue before they’re bounced, simple set the queuelifetime:

By default, sendmail will keep items in the queue for up to 5 days.

If you find that memory limits differ between root and other users when PHP scripts are run from the command line, there may be an issue with your php.

Should you find yourself needing to send e-mail destined for a certain account to a blackhole or to /dev/null, you’ll find very little information from Google.

If you find that someone has done a recursive chmod or chown on a server, don’t fret.

If something horrible happened to your Urchin license key or you need to replace it with something else, just run this command to change the key:

If you’re used to SHOW PROCESSLIST; or mysqladmin processlist in MySQL, you might be searching for this same functionality in postgresql.

One of the nifty things about FreeBSD’s kernel is that it will limit closed port RST responses, which, in layman’s terms, just means that if someone repeatedly hits a port that’s closed, the kernel won’t respond to all of the requests.

I found myself pretty darned frustrated when my arrow keys didn’t work in iTerm in vi/vim or other ncurses-based applications.

If you receive the following error, your PIX does not have a key set up for use with SSH:

Installing snort from ports on FreeBSD is pretty straightforward, but there are some ‘gotchas’ that you need to be aware of.

Installing mysql on FreeBSD from ports is one of the oddest installations I’ve ever completed.

If Redhat, CentOS, Fedora, or any other similar OS provides the following error:

Normally, Postfix will reject e-mail sent to non-existent users if a catchall isn’t present for the specific domain that is receiving mail.

If up2date throws some horrible Python errors and rpm says “rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries”, you can restore your system to normality with the following:

If you have an open_basedir restriction that is causing issues with a domain, you can remove the restriction easily.

When Plesk is installed, the default certificate for the Plesk interface itself is a self-signed certificate that is generated during the installation.

To enable submission access on port 587 in sendmail, add the following to the sendmail.

On some operating systems, postgresql is not configured to listen on the network.

If there’s one question I get a lot, it would be “Hey, how can I speed up MySQL?

On some servers, you may notice that MySQL is consuming CPU and memory resources when it’s not processing any queries.

Thanks to a highly awesome technician on my team, we’ve discovered the perfect permissions setup for Joomla and Plesk:

If you need to strip query strings from a URL with mod_rewrite, you can use a rewrite syntax such as the following: