Author: sblogadmin

Outgoing mail is no longer working (error 0x8004210B)

Question:

I get the error :

Task ‘xxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com – Sending’ reported error (0x8004210B): ‘the
operation timed out waiting for a response from the sending (SMTP) server.
If you continue to receive this message, contact your server administrator or
Internet service provider (ISP).’

when trying to send mail. How can I fix this?

Answer:

Your local ISP may have begun blocking port 25. Many ISP’s do this to attempt to make you only send through their SMTP servers so they can better manage all mail leaving their network (to control spam). Change the port to 2525 in your email program and it will likely work. If 2525 does not work, try port 587.

Another – less likely cause – is hung anti-virus software running on your computer. Some anti-virus / anti-malware software re-directs all port 25 activity to scan mail before it leaves your computer. Try to restart your computer and/or anti-virus software and see if this corrects the problem.

Webmin crashing / unresponsive on my VPS – how to fix?

Question: Webmin keeps crashing on my VPS. Why does this happen and how can I fix it?

Answer:

From our experience, webmin seems to become non-responsive when running on “low memory” VPS’s (typically those with 256 megs of ram or less).

If you attempt to connect to webmin (port 10000 by default) and get an unable to connect message, do the following:

1. ssh in to your server
2. as root, type :

/sbin/service webmin restart

Note, that “service” will restart webmin on a RedHat/Centos based VPS. If you are running a different Linux flavor you’ll need to use the service management for that distribution.

You should also make sure webmin is set to start automatically on reboots by running:

/sbin/chkconfig webmin on

Hide index.html from URL in address bar

Question: I want users to my site to always go to the base URL http://site.com/ – I never want the index page to show. For example, I want http://site.com/index.html to redirect automatically to http://site.com without the index.html

Answer:

Create a .htaccess file (or add to your existing .htaccess) in the top level directory for your site and add the following line:


RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^index\.html$ / [R=301,L]

The line :


RewriteEngine on

may already be in your existing .htaccess. If so, do not duplicate it.

I can’t connect to webmin on my VPS

Question:

I tried to connected to webmin on my VPS today and got the error :

Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at 100.100.100.100:10000.

(where 100.100.100.100 is the IP of your VPS)

What is wrong?

Answer:

Hi,

This means webmin has crashed and is a warning sign that you are likely using more memory than your VPS has installed. On VPS’s with low memory, webmin seems to be one of the first things to lock up.

You can restart it by ssh’ing to the server and typing:

/sbin/service restart webmin

You could also reboot the entire VPS in your control panel as last resort if you do not have ssh access from your current location.

If you would like to purchase more memory contact support. Memory upgrades are quick and do not require any downtime to your VPS>

All commands on my VPS return “fork: Cannot allocate memory”

Question:

No matter what I do, my VPS returns “fork: Cannot allocate memory”. What is happening?

Answer:

“fork: Cannot allocate memory” means that you have locked up the VPS by allocating too much memory (and thereby no memory is left to start (ie. fork) any new processes). You can try to kill -9 processes that are running but many times you need to reboot the VPS from the control panel.

WordPress uploads fail. max_upload_filesize set correctly but still fails

Question:

My WordPress blog fails on uploads over a certain size. I’m made sure that php’s max_upload_filesize is set correctly in my php.ini. Why do the uploads still fail.

Answer:

Make sure that post_max_size is also set to be at or above the size file you want to upload. If not, your wordpress uploads will fail. You can set this in your etc/php.ini file. The change takes effect immediately as soon as you save and/or upload the new php.ini file.

Using geoip in .htaccess files / banning IP based on geographic region

Question

I was wondering if you have any support for banning specific countries, such as geoip?

Answer

We do not support geoip by default due to the extra load it would add to every page request.

However you can use it or any other geographic based IP bans in your .htaccess files. Any tutorial for doing so should work fine on your account with us.

You can also upgrade to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) and install geoip support to the webserver on the VPS.

Crontab is creating sequentially numbered, emtpy files in my directory (file.1, file.2, file.3 etc.)

Question:

I have the following crontab:

* * * * * /usr/bin/wget http://mydomain.com/ow_cron/run.php > /dev/null

It works but it leaves files called run.0, run.1, run.2, etc. in my home directory. I added :

> /dev/null 2>&1

to the crontab but it still does it. How can I make it stop?

Answer

Add the option:

–delete-after

and the annoying sequentially numbered files should stop.

An example:

* * * * * /usr/bin/wget --delete-after http://mydomain.com/ow_cron/run.php > /dev/null

DNS customization, google apps, etc.

Question:

Do you allow DNS customization. My domain DNS is hosted by phpwebhosting, but I would like to point MX records to Google Apps or an additional A record pointing to my IP.

Answer:

Yes, you can either do your own DNS if you prefer or let us do it. If we do it, all requests for subdomains and domains are added automatically in the control panel.

There is a section to modify your MX record in the control panel. We have many clients using Google Apps for mail.

How do I upgrade php on a VPS?

Question:

The php version on my VPS is out of date. How do I update it?

Answer:

Using the OS vendors normal update command can get you some updates (but perhaps not what you want – see below). For example on RedHat/CentOS run:

yum update php

However usually the OS vendors versions are not the latest. The update them to patch security issues but many times are far out of date from what you may require.

To update RedHat/CentOS to a newer php run these commands:


yum erase php-pdo php-xml php-mysql php php-common php-cli php-gd php-mbstring php-devel

yum install php53-pdo php53-xml php53-mysql php53 php53-common php53-cli php53-gd php53-mbstring

/sbin/service httpd restart

A note:

These are “unofficial” RPM’s as RedHat only official supports a particular (semi-old) version and backports security fixes to it – good for large corporate users but not so great for active developers). However the RPMS’s above are widely used in the community and most developers view them as trustworthy (just important to note that they are not actually from RedHat).