Now by providing FTP credentials, you can automatically update your plugins safely and securely.  And there are those that worry about the security of storing your FTP password in the config files.  Well the fact is your database password is already stored in that same file.  In addition, if you think about it, if you had to type your username/password each time into your web-browser, that info is being sent over the net already anyways.

Besides, the FTP method is much more secure on shared servers than using chmod 777 on everything in sight.  FTP updates/updating seems to be the way of the future as opposed to using chmod 777, apps like Joomla have already adopted this method.

There is one catch though, if you don’t have passwords and forms saved in your browser, Wordpress will ask you for your FTP login credentials every time.  If you manage alot of Wordpress sites, this can get annoying very quickly.

Thankfully, there’s a simple solution which will save the FTP login (username/password/server) so Wordpress stops asking you for them.  Here’s how you do it.

1.  Locate your Wordpress root diectory and find the “wp-config.php” file.

2.  Edit the file and insert this somewhere in the middle as it’s own block, we normally put it after the mysql username/password block.

/*** FTP login settings ***/
define("FTP_HOST", "localhost");
define("FTP_USER", "yourftpusername");
define("FTP_PASS", "yourftppassword");

Of course you'll want to change "yourftpusername" and "yourftppassword" to the actual FTP usernames/passwords for your site.

Once you’ve made that edit, save the file and voila!  No more punching in your ftp username and password all the time.

As most of you all know, iMountain.com mostly utilizes Opteron processors for their energy efficiency and high performance.

Well we’re psyched up for AMD’s newest offering of 6 core processors code-named “Istanbul”.  Based on their latest 45 nanometer design, these processors promise to be fast and most importantly, energy-efficient.   These new 6 core chips promise to increase performance by 35% per watt consumption compared to previous generation chips.

Another performance enhancing feature will be “HT Assist” which sort of indexes the contents of the various CPU’s so that data can be interchanged quickly and efficiently.

Cray, famous for its supercomputers, has also announced that the Cray XT5m will be using these new Opteron 6 Core chips at the core of its supercomputing platform.

Although we won’t be using any Cray Supercomputers, we can’t wait to get our hands on some of these 6-cores to build a 48 Core server.

We were about to go and purchase specific Socket F/1207 heatsinks and fans when we noticed the AMD Opteron 1st Generation Socket 940 Opteron heatsink mounting patterns looked extremely similar.

We did some precise measurements on the heatsink/backplates and lo and behold, the mounting pitches are exactly identical at “3.5″.   The other consideration is the thermal envelope of the new chips versus the old socket 940 chips and that isn’t an issue.    Socket F also came out with a 4.1″ mounting pitch (which is NOT compatible with Socket 940 heatsinks) but it is pretty rare…only motherboard we know of that uses the odd 4.1″ mounting pitch is the Tyan S2912G2NR.

So, YES, you can use most of the Socket 940 CPU’s with the newer Opteron Socket F/Socket 1207 as their mounting, thermal envelope and pitch are virtually identical.  Just make sure you use a high quality fan, as this is usually the PC component that breaks down first.

By re-using these high quality copper heatsinks instead of throwing them out, we’ll be recycling a ton of copper!

Email sales .@.iMountain.com for more information and pricing.

• NEBULA CLASS DEDICATED SERVER
• Dual Opteron 252 2.6 Ghz CPU
• 2000 GB Bandwith/month – test file: http://www.imountain.com/10meg.zip
• 160 GB SATA Drive
• 2 Gigabytes RAM (2048 MB)
• 3 IP Addresses
• Servers are un-managed, ask about server management
• cPanel/DirectAdmin available directly from iMountain or purchase your own licenses
• Special Discounts for 6 months/1 year/2 Year payment terms

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.