If you have a VPS or Linux server running Apache the goold old fashioned way without fancy control panels, you’ll quickly have to learn some Apache tweaks.

One of the main issues we commonly run into is a non-working .htaccess file.  Apache doesn’t come with .htaccess support automatically turned on.  You’ll have to turn it on in order for .htaccess files to have an effect.  Here’s what you do:

There are two ways,

1. Edit your httpd.conf manually using a text editor like vim, nano, vi, joe whatever you like.
2. Edit your httpd.conf through Webmin

Since the Webmin version is more graphical, we’ll show you how to do it through Webmin.  If you’re using a text editor, just skip to the portion with the AllowOveride command.

1. Login to your Webmin
2. Servers>Apache
3. Go to the Global Configuration tab
4. Click on EDIT CONFIG FILES
5. 
6. Search for AllowOveride and .htaccess and remove the # sign in front or type “AllowOveride All”.

This should fix it permanently and allow your .htaccess files to override pretty much and directive needed.

Invariably, you may find yourself with a missing YUM install or a corrupted installation and need to re-install yum to fix this problem.

Yum of course is used to easily install RPM packages like PHP or Apache or pretty much anything.  It’s equivalent would be “apt-get” on Debian based Linux systems.

So here’s how you would install YUM from scratch:
rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/libxml2-2.6.16-10.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/libxml2-python-2.6.16-10.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.el4.centos.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/sqlite-3.3.6-2.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/rpm-python-4.3.3-22_nonptl.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/ftp.centos.org/4.6/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-metadata-parser-1.0-8.el4.centos.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/ftp.centos.org/4.6/os/x86_64/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-4.el4.centos.noarch.rpm

Just copy and paste the above RPM code into your SSH session.

So most of us here are Joomla fans while some are Drupal fans.  It’s a matter of choice really, they’re both quite good as far as CMS’ go.

But that’s not why I’m writing today.

One of the things that annoys me the most is Joomla’s quick timeout when you’re logged into the administrator back-end.  It seems that if you walk away for a few minutes, your Joomla’s timed out and you have to login all over again.  It’s especially annoying if you were working on a new article and didn’t save it prior to being logged out.  Yup, that means you have to type it all over again.

Well, if you’ve had enough of this nonsense, thankfully, you can change it pretty easily.

1. Go into your Joomla Administrative back-end
2. Click on the GLOBAL CONFIGURATION icon in the lower left of the page or you can use the menu SITE > GLOBAL CONFIGURATION.
3. Click on the SYSTEM tab
4. On the lower right side of the page, look for SESSION SETTINGS
5. Change the MINUTES to however long you want to stay logged in


That’s it, now you can safely go get another cup of coffee without having to worry about re-typing everything all over again.

Dear WebHosting Clients

NOTE: This does not affect Dedicated Server clients.

We will be moving to a major upgrade of our HSphere system this weekend. Our planned maintenance window will be 10PM-4AM Pacific/California Time. If everything works well, you probably won’t notice more than 30 minutes of down-time but we have a large window just in case.

Please make any backups of your sites and databases in the next few days.

Your server will not be down the entire time but we have to update quite a few servers so there’s a good chance you will experience some intermittent connectivity issues.

For sure, these servers will be down for 30 minutes:

1) All mySQL clusters. If you use any of the mysqlxxx.imountain.com clusters, you will experience 30 minutes of down-time for the upgrade somewhere between 10PM and 4AM.

2) The cp.imountain.com Control panel server will be down for 30 minutes.

3) Mail clusters should be down about 15 minutes each.

4) Webservers will probably NOT be down. We will not be updating the webservers (most likely).

Changes you will notice after the updates:

1) HSphere Control panel skin will look different; however, the old skin is still selectable if you prefer. The new control Panel looks more like “Plesk” or “HSPComplete” if you’re familiar with those.

2) Apache 2.2 will be available on a separate server which you can move to if you wish. Apache 2.2 will be our standard webserver offering moving forward.

3) Ruby on Rails support will also be available on the Apache 2.2 servers.

4) The mySQL clusters will be fully replicated and backed up with a live backup server: 1 replication cluster + 1 backup server with data 3 hours behind. This is probably one of the most fault-tolerant mySQL solutions you can find in a public hosting environment.

5) We will be changing our naming and our logos from “Iron Mountain Hosting” to “iMountain.com”. This is a rebranding of our services, so we’ll just be known from our domain name “iMountain”.

6) Major updates to all the EasyApp packages to upgrade to the latest and greatest versions like Joomla 1.5.2, phpBB3, Wordpress 2.5, etc.

That’s all for now, please make sure you run your backups just in case. We’ve been testing the installation for a few months now and things look to be running fine.

Enjoy your 4th of July holiday and as always, it’s a pleasure serving you.

iMountain.com