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.

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.

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.

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

First of all, PDF Lite is the stripped down but free version of PDFLib. This library allows you to generate PDF files and can be quite handy. The easiest thing is to confuse the two versions, we’re using the Lite version which doesn’t have as many features but it’s free and doesn’t watermark your PDFs. The Lite version is good for just messing around with but if this is a commercial endeavor, you should get the full version found here : http://www.pdflib.com/

This tutorial installs the FREE Lite package version 7.03. Alright, let’s get started:
OS: CentOS 4.5/5,RHEL 4/5
Requires: PECL to be running and available and most likely has to be done as the root user

cd /usr/src
wget http://www.pdflib.com/binaries/PDFlib/703/PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3.tar.gz
tar xzpf PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3.tar.gz
cd PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3
./configure
make
make install
pecl install pdflib

The system will now ask you for the installation location of pdflib (path to pdflib installation?), put in:
/usr/local

Once it’s done installing, let’s finish this up:
cp /usr/local/lib/libpdf.so /usr/include/php/ext
echo "[libpdf]” >> /etc/php.ini
echo “extension=pdf.so” >> /etc/php.ini
service httpd restart

That should do it, check your phpinfo to make sure it works and go make some PDFs.

Part 1 - Install Memcache

Part 2 - Install eAcclerator

Part 3 - Modify Wordpress to use Memcache + eAccelerator

PART 1 of 3: Memcache
Memcache aka Memcached is:

…a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load

In layman’s terms, it’s a caching system using RAM to cache your website and make it run quicker. Why would Memcache speed up your site? It basically takes your often hit pages and caches it into RAM. By caching it into RAM, your page doesn’t need to be regenerated as the information is still in memory. Large websites have huge Memcache server farms whose sole purpose is to cache data for quick retrieval, that’s how the big boys do it. Even Howard Stern uses Memcache.

Well we might not have millions of hits and gigabytes of Memcache but even a little bit of Memcache can help medium traffic sites. No, memcache is not for everybody, it doesn’t do you much good if your site doesn’t see much traffic. But if you have a popular Wordpress Blog or vBulletin forum, a little Memcache can go a long way.

We have found that Memcache + eAccelerator greatly increases the speed of your site and reduces the overall server load. So you might ask, how do I get Memcache working with Wordpress, let’s get started:

NOTE: This article assumes that you have root/admin access to your server. If you are on a hosted/shared webserver, just ask your hosting company to do the work for you and skip to the Wordpress Memcache plugin section.

1) First things first, your server must have memcache installed on it. These are CentOS/RHEL instructions, you’ll have to figure out how to do it for Debian/Ubuntu but it should be similar.

Download, Compile and Install Memcache (also installs zlib which is required by Memcache):
mkdir /usr/src/install
cd /usr/src/install
wget http://www.danga.com/memcached/dist/memcached-1.2.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf memcached-1.2.2.tar.gz
cd memcached-1.2.2
yum -y install libevent-devel
./configure
make
make install


2) Install the Memcache PHP extension:
yum -y install zlib-devel
wget http://pecl.php.net/get/memcache-2.1.2.tgz
tar xzvf memcache-2.1.2.tgz
cd memcache-2.1.2


Ok, now you have to find where your “phpize” resides, be careful if you have multiple PHP versions, you have to find the right one:
locate phpize
This should output the location of phpize, you will need to insert it into the following step:

export PHP_PREFIX="PATH_TO_YOUR_PHPIZE_COMMAND"
$PHP_PREFIX ./configure --with-php-config=/hsphere/shared/php5/bin/php-config
make
make install

Now you have to edit php.ini to include Memcache, first locate the correct php.ini file. Again, it should be the main php.ini file:
locate php.ini

Once you have the path to php.ini, you need to edit it to include the Memcache extension
nano PATH_TO_PHP.INI_FILE

INSERT this in there and save your file:
extension=memcache.so

Restart your webserver and you should have Memcache working.

Congratulations to the fine gentlemen who we’ve gotten to know at Arena Junkies, here’s their presser.

Arena Junkies Joins the Curse Network
http://arenajunkies.com/showthread.php?t=26892

We are very excited to announce today that Arena Junkies has joined the Curse network. Curse approached us a few months ago, as they’ve been interested in supporting the PvP community for quite a while now, and immediately recognized the strong community we’ve built here. It’s with that in mind that we’re excited to finally tell you about the partnership.

Having the support of Curse is going to allow us to bring you much cooler tools and features in the future.

How will this change Arena Junkies as you know it? Very little; myself and Naxos are still the site administrators and we are going to uphold the high standards for which Arena Junkies has become known.

Partnering with Curse is going to give us even more resources to, as always, bring you the best Warcraft PvP site around. Expect to see some great new features in the coming months like the enhanced talent calculator, improved recruitment features, and more.

Here’s a link to the contest and a short excerpt(maybe we’ll get some points too:

Greatest Domaining Blogging Contest Ever

Want to win over $8979.13 in real cash and prizes?

I am happy to announce the launch of the DNXpert contest / prize giveaway that is going to shake the foundations of the blogosphere.

This contest comprises of over 62 genuine prizes including cash, material goods and quality digital products that a domainer / blogger can make use of on a daily basis.

All the resources below ( include $1,360 in cash ) can be used to directly benefit a domainer or blogger in their daily pursuit of online wealth.

With so many prizes at stake you have every chance of winning!

The Prizes

Cash

Gift packs

Domaining And Blogging, Resources, Memberships And Subscriptions

Advertising

Prize Recap

• $700 in cash from We Build Pages who offer Link Building Services. ($700 value)
• $200 credit deposited into NameDrive domain parking account courtesy of NameDrive.com. ($200 value)
• $100 Godaddy Gift card from instantdomaintool.com. ($100 value)
• $100 credit in Bidvertiser account. ($100 value)
• $100 Cash from wordpressfreelance.com ($100 value)
• $50 cash from Ades blog
• $35 Cash from Tim Schroeder of eMonetized.com. ($35 value)
• $35 Cash from Web Hosting Reviews. ($35 value)
• $30 Cash from Life is colourful. ($30 value)
• 1 Market Leverage promo pack consisting of: MarketLeverage iFlip (digital camera), MLRewards card ($50), MarketLeverage USB Pen, MarketLeverage Polo and hat, MarketLeverage/Nike duffelbag. ($350 value)
• 2 x Market Leverage promo pack consisting of MLRewards card ($25), MarketLeverage USB Pen, MarketLeverage Polo and hat, MarketLeverage/Nike duffelbag. (2 x $220 value)
• 3 x Market Leverage USB Pens with $10 ML Rewards card. (3 x $35 value)
• 6 months subscription to MarketMotive.com top internet marketing minds. ($1794 value)
• 1 hour of SEO Consulting from Todd Malicoat from seo consulting. ($500 value)
• 1 year’s PRO Subscriptions membership to FreshDrop.net. ($395.40 value)
• 5 x 1 license of the software product Domain Name Pro (5 x $64.95 value)
• 3 months membership at Aaron Wall’s SeoBook course. ($300 value)
• 3 x 1 copy of the Domain Graduate ebook. (3 x $87 value)
• 5 x 1 exclusive list of 100 expired domains from DNXpert.com (5 x $50 value)
• 6 months premium clustered hosting at iMountain.com (6 x $39.95 value)
• 2 months VIP membership at ClickMojo ($200 value)
• 15 minute one on one phone coaching session with Simon Johnson from Domainer Income ($200 value)
• 2 year subscription to DNSstuff pro tools. ($139 value)
• 1 x 100 domain parking account at WhyPark.com ($99.95 value)
• 1 copy of the Revenue Domains Exposed ebook ($97 value)
• 2 month subscription at Wordze.com ($90 value)
• 3 x 1 copy of the Domaining Manifesto ebook. (3 x $27 value)
• 1 copy of Wordze’s Guide to Keyword Research & Niche Wealth Building! ($80 value)
• 1 copy of a single use license of Brian Gardner’s Revolution blog theme of the winners’ choice ($79.99 value)
• 1 copy of Optin Comments WP plugin. ($77 value)
• 1 DNForum.com Platinum membership. ($59.95 value)
• 1 yearly subscription to Gold Account at iwebtool.com ($59 value)
• 3 x 1 copy of the Killer Domains ebook (3 x $17 value)
• 2 x 50 available domains from WordFuse.com (2 x $24.95 value)
• 1 featured listing on Sedo’s homepage for 1 domain. (worth $39)
• 1 DNForum.com Gold membership ($19.95 value)
• 1 Month DomainNews.com Newsletter Sponsorship - Top Position Advertising ($500 value)
• 2 months 160×90 ad on ClickFire.com homepage (2 x $200 value)
• 1 Month text link on JustDropped.com search pages ($100 value)
• 1 month text link at DomainNameWire.com ($60 value)
• 1 month of 125×125 banner advertising on Winning the Web ($50 value)
• 1 month 125×125 banner advertising at DNXpert.com ($50 value)
• 1 month 125×125 banner advertising at DotSauce.com ($40 value)
• 1 month text link on blogaboutyourblog.com ($10 value)
• 1 copy of Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger ebook ($16.49 value)

This contest was partly inspired by my friend Gyutae Park of WinningTheWeb.com so make sure you pay him a visit.

How The Contest Works

Ok, so you have had a look at the prizes and you have to agree that they are mighty impressive.

This contest will last for one month. Winners of all the prizes will be selected by a random draw on the 19th of June 2008. I am currently thinking that to help promote transparency of the contest, I will hold the contest draw live in a chatroom at either NamePros or DNForum or in a chat room installed on here at DNXpert.com. You can win more then one prize as long as you are eligible.

To be eligible for the contest you simply have to perform a set of actions as specified in the instructions below. As you go through the specified actions you gain entry points in the random draw pot. The more entry points you gain, the higher your probability of winning prizes. ( Please note that prize providers are not eligible to enter the contest so as to avoid any bias issues. )

During this contest month I will be revealing further clues on how you can gain more entry points to increase your winning probability even further.

Contest Steps And How To Earn Entry Points

Step 1: ( This step is required ). In order to receive news about the contest progress and important clues on how to gain further entry points during the contest month you must be subscribed to the DNXpert newsletter. The DNXpert newsletter gives you access to regular free expired domain lists. I never spam my newsletter subscribers and you may unsubscribe at any time. You gain 1 entry point by subscribing to the DNXpert newsletter.

Please use the form below to subscribe. Once you subscribe to the newsletter please leave a comment below to indicate your participation in the contest ( you must do this to be in the contest as it’s the only way I can know that you want to participate ).

Step 2: Blog about this contest on your blog. Blogging about this contest gains you 10 entry points. If you blog about this contest and post the entire Prize Recap list which you can download here you will gain a massive 20 entry points.

Step 3: Perform further actions during the contest month that I will reveal via the DNXpert newsletter and the DNXpert.com blog.

Contest Steps And How To Earn Entry Points

• Subscribe to DNXpert newsletter using the form above - required. (1 point )
• Blog about this contest (10 points)
• Blog about this contest and include the Prize Recap list in your post. You can download the Prize Recap list code here. (20 points)
• Follow the DNXpert newsletter and blog for further chances of gaining entry points during the contest month

As indicated earlier this contest will end with a random draw on the 19th June 2008. Please make sure you use the same email and website during the entire contest so I can track your entries easier.

You have to be in it to win it! $8979.13 is at stake!

Good luck to everyone!

To help promote transparency for this contest I have compiled a list of current contest entries and their entry points. If you have entered the contest and your entry does not appear at the specified page please let me know.

Earn extra entry points

Additional Task #1 : Digg Your Way To Success ( 3 entry points )
Additional Task #2 : Stumbling Towards The Prize ( 3 entry points )

As most of our clients know, our sister company ValueSolar.com provides excellent quality Mitsubishi panels at a reasonable price. They do nationwide installations and no job is too small (residential, commercial, anything solar). Right now, they are working on a 22,000 solar panel installation at some college. I’ll be sure to post some pictures on that once they’re done.

We’ve been putting off our updates mostly because we were waiting for our entire set to be installed. But unfortunately, we’re still waiting on permits for the freeway panel set from the City of Pomona.

Which brings up another point…wouldn’t city governments embrace cleaner electricity? Everybody says they are interested in cleaning up our environment but fail to act upon it. We are the first solar powered business in the City of Pomona but yet, our permits for our set of additional panels have been in for months now.

But this is not to fault the city, we understand there are many concerns involved such as safety. Yet, we only wished that more governments would give a little extra effort towards environmentally friendly endeavors. We’re not asking for any breaks, just a little expediency would be nice because the longer we wait, the more pollution we’re putting into the air. That said, we’ve worked with very nice people in the city office.

Everybody likes to see pictures so let’s have some pictures shall we? Here’s a closeup of what a panel looks like. It’s been raining for over a week now with thunderstorms and things so please excuse our clouds in the picture. We’ll try to go up and take some sunny day pictures one of these days.

We use lead free panels made by Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi leads the way in solar technology due to their high efficiency rating and lead free manufacturing process. What’s the point of using Solar if you’re dumping lead back into the environment…that’s the reason why we’re so high on these Mitsubishi panels.

We have panels spread out across our roof; mostly in cells where we can manage them. Also, we have to still leave room to maneuver around the roof. Stepping ever so slightly on a panel will break it.

Here’s some on our East wing:

And some on our West Wing (sounds like that TV Show). Sorry for the mess, our roof is littered with AC units, pipes, conduits and all kinds of things that go bump in the night.

And as we blogged before, we’re still waiting for our permits to put up panels on our south facing side. This rail is just waiting to be filled up with solar panels and runs the length of our building and then some. We can’t wait to put up a Freeway cam powered on Solar Energy…I think it would the first of its kind. We get excellent views of the 10 freeway (east and west), and the 57 / 210 / 10 freeway interchange.

That’s it for now, in our next installment, we’ll have more details on our SolarCam (we hope). And if you work in the City of Pomona government office, please go hit up the building inspector and ask him to approve our freeway solar panel permits, pretty please with sugar on top

One of our newer clients has an American Idol Blog that we’ve had a hard time resisting. Idol Blog Live is run by Slimtainment.com and from all we’ve heard, seen and read, it’s the definitive blog for American Idol fans. Especially with Season 7 rolling around, they’re starting to heat up.

Some of the support guys here catch up on their American Idol news when they’re eating their lunch at midnight. And truth be told, it’s one of the better blogs we’ve seen out there.

The best thing about IdolBlogLive.com is that the blog gets updated daily and oftentimes, it’s updated several times a day. You all know those blogs that get updated only once a year right? Well this isn’t one of them. Sometimes the news gets updated on the site even before it appears on some of the major news outlets.

Features of Idol Blog Live

• Constant American Idol News and Updates
• American Idol Season 7 Spoilers and Galleries
• Live Blog feeds during the American Idol airings on National TV
• Lively Chatroom and Forums
• Large Picture Gallery of American Idol Seasons 1-7
• Videos from latest performances, Music Videos and News Videos of your favorite American Idol Star

IdolBlogLive.com is one of the most popular blogs around and has been highlighted in numerous journals including one of the most famous server crashes ever.

American Idol’s best fan site, we wholly recommend checking out this entertaining blog - IdolBlogLive.com

The technology behind this popular website
IdolBlogLive.com runs on one of Iron Mountain Hosting’s Luxury Clusters, semi-dedicated server clusters, powered by Enterprise Class 4-16 Core servers dedicated to the task of propelling the blog through traffic surges. One of the features of iMountain.com Luxury Semi-Dedicated Cluster is the use of memcache memory caching servers. This caching technology is used on many of the large websites like eBay, Amazon, etc. With dedicated server caching, sites like IdolBlogLive can survive Diggs and major traffic spikes with ease. Caching is available for sites utilizing Wordpress, vBulletin, SMF Forums, Drupal, Joomla 1.5 and many other popular PHP scripts.

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