Dedicated Server Support

Post after a year

2008-03-31T13:44:00.000-07:00

I was busy with other web sites and could not find time for posting on this blog. Few days ago i found i have not made any post on this blog in year 2007. I will try on this blog on coming days.

I have been posting tech related stuff on another blog, then moved away from that too and started creating a wiki at

http://www.webhostingneeds.com

Last month, i have started a new Free File Hosting web site

http://uploads.bizhat.com

The script can handle multiple storage servers, lighttpd and mod_secdownload will do a great job for free file hosting. It have beeon online for nearly 1 month now and is serving files at 40 Mbps avarge. I expect it will reach 100 Mbps by end of next month.

Downloading Movies from Google, YouTube, etc..

2006-11-24T10:16:00.000-08:00

Yesterday i found a site

http://keepvid.com/

Which allows you to download moves from YouTube, Google Videos.

With this, you can download video in .flv extension.

You can download free FLV Player from

www.martijndevisser.com

I have created a YouTube clone for BizHat.com at

http://video.bizhat.com

Users can upload moves on the site and it will converted to .flv format using ffmpeg for playing with flash players online.

New domain name

2006-11-19T14:45:00.000-08:00

Today registered new domain name for FlashWebHost

http://www.FlashWeb.in

On BizHat, i changed dating site, game and directory

http://games.bizhat.com
http://dating.bizhat.com
http://directory.bizhat.com

A video site will be coming soon...

New PC and New Problems

2006-11-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

Two days back brought a new PC from Lotus.

P 4 3 GHz HT
1 GB RAM
80 GB SATA
Viewsonic VA712 Monitor.

This pc got HD Audio, creating problem with my Pinnacle PCTV Tuner card. No sound is coming from PCTV Vision. I tried installing WinDVR, it also not able to pay sound.

Waiting for a solution from pinnacle, not sure if it got a solution, getting another Tuner Card to work with my PC is a bad idea. Using pinnacle forum for support is really difficuly, they much upgrade their forum to phpBB or vBulletin :-)

After long time, today i placed an advertisement for script installation service on ebay, last two advertisements where almost waste of money, have some fund in ebay, so have to use, may be get an installation this time.

Signup Script for phpBB Forum

2006-10-23T14:57:00.000-07:00

Today i have completely rewrittem phpBB Free Forum hosting signup script. New script used CAPTCHA and have better form validation.

Signup form is available at

http://www.netfreehost.com/phpbb/signup.php

This provides Free Hosted phpBB forum for webmasters who need to start community discussion forum for their web site.

Hosting Controller Releases HC7

2006-10-23T14:55:00.000-07:00

Hosting Controller released new version of Hosting Controller control panel.

http://www.hostingcontroller.com/

The new feature is HC is able to manage both Linux and Windows servers. Other control panel that can do this is psoft's Hsphere control panel.

HC7 gives its users the freedom to use any operating system (Windows/Linux) on the servers, with just one limitation that the control or master server must have Windows servers installed on it. This provides flexibility to manage Windows (IIS) and Linux (Apache) web servers simultaneously through a centralized single interface.

Moving your Helm licence to another server

2006-10-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

Do you want to move your Helm licence to a different server? Maybe you have just migrated your Helm build over to another server and want to get it working with your existing licence. Or maybe you want to just use the licence on a new server in order to get it up and running correctly. In any case, the licence control is in your hands all you need to do is reset it.

Simply log into the Members Area of our site using your WHA account number and password.

Click on View Your Product Licences to see a list of licences in your account.

Click on the Licence Key that needs resetting.

Click the Reset button.

Your licence is now reset. All you need to do now is to put the licence into the Helm Configuration Tool of the server you want to use the licence with and enter it, then click the Update Now button. The licence has now been successfully moved!

Free HELM Control Panel Licence

2006-10-20T17:43:00.000-07:00

WHA started offering Free HELM control panel license for up to 5 domains.

http://www.webhostautomation.com/webhost-840

This is very good offer for those who need to test HELM.

When i first got HELM on my Windows server, i have a 30 day test installation on my computer.

With this 5 domain license, you can run test HELM installation on your local computer or on server as long as you wish.

As for buying a license, HELM is really costly. It cost $899 per license. I have my own two license. When i but i do not pay that much, it only cost me some $200.

But now they increased the price, if i need to upgrade my license, i have to pay 50% of license fee. That is some $400 for both my HELM license. That is really bad, you have to pay every year.

HELM is taking advantage of their market monopoly, i strongly wish other Hosting Control software like www.HostingController.com come to market actively with special offers.

If you need a HELM license, it is better to buy a dedicated server from www.ThePlanet.com data center, they offer HELM for $15 per month. That is lot cheaper than getting directly from HELM.

How to make nuclear bomb

2006-10-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

With lot of country need to make their own Nuclear Bomb, I made a search in google for "how to make nuclear bomb HOW-TO". Found lot of links to nuclear and atom bomb related sites. May be it is time for some eMarketers to write ebook on "How to Make Your Own Nuclear Bomb in 20 days" and make money :-)

You can find some good stuff on how nuclear bomb works at

http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-bomb.htm

New Office Construction Work Started

2006-10-04T13:53:00.000-07:00

On Monday (25 Sept 2006) construction work for new office room started. New trainee's are studying PHP, this is second month, may be in one or two months, we will be able to start our projects. There are too many projects in my TO-DO list.

New staff Santhosh joined BizHat Team few days back. He is MCA and have experience in Java/Servlet programming. He is studying PHP now, since he already know programming, he is getting ready fast. He may be able to guide the trainee programmers who are freshers.

BizHat.com Alexa Rank is 2,118 now. Now its time to dream 1,xxx range :-)

Onam Holidays

2006-09-13T14:44:00.000-07:00

Last week was onam holidays in kerala. There was only one working day in last week. BizHat.com have now 4 PHP trainees, they have completed 1 month, may be they will be ready to take up PHP project by next month. BizHat need many more services and many of the services need to redesign, for example the classified is not good and have to completely redesign it.

Sibi is working on moving web sites to CMS. By moving sites to CMS, it is easy to manage, no ftp, text editors, saving files, etc... Everything can done through browser from anywhere. You can see a page about onam, that is from the CMS at http://kerala.bizhat.com/onam.html

On saturday, we shifed FlashWebHost.com to new office. This is thrid office location in Kochi. First office was in Elamkulam, then moved to Kadvanthra, now at Valanjambalam. Yesterday night, i made a Location map, you can see it at http://www.flashwebhost.com/location.php

New Mail Server

2006-08-07T01:52:00.000-07:00

I have been working on setting up mail server for BizHat.com Mail for last few weeks.

Today i have finished the work and made the Mail server public.

http://mail.bizhat.com

The service will allow users to signup for email accounts.

The mail server setup is capable to providing POP3 and IMAP access to users.

BizHat.com email service started 3 years back with Free www.everyone.net service, later moved to www.hivemail.com it run for about 1 year. But we have to stop the service as HiveMail could not handle the volume of mail we start getting, hive mail is created such a way that it have to accept all mails. So it can kill the mail server.

After Hivemail stoped working, have moved to www.gawab.net The service was not reliable and too much advertisements.

Now BizHat.com Mail is running on its own mail server. All developed from opensource software. Hope this will do handle lot more users with out problem.

Postfix Mail Server

2006-07-31T18:59:00.000-07:00

I am now studying postfix mail server. Already setup postfix on server22.hosthat.com and is working great with basic configuration. Now it only handle one domain name, that is real user (system accounts).

I have brought The Book of Postfix

http://www.postfix-book.com

I have read first few chapters. My plan is to make a mail server with postfix + LDAP.

Postfix seems easy to setup compared to Qmail. I have installed Postfix with out much reading. Qmail, i have to spend lot of time to get it working, mainly because it need several small scripts and two other supporting programs to get it working.

Another advantage i see over qmail is postfix is still actively developed. Qmail, you need to patch to get it working. So descided to go with postfix for my new mails server project.

I have added new forum for postfix on my qmail forum at

http://qmail.netfreehost.com

BizHat.com Home Page redesigned

2006-07-10T06:47:00.000-07:00

Two days back, i redesigned home page of bizhat

New design is available at

www.bizhat.com

Old design is backed up at

www.bizhat.com/index_new.php

New Free Hosted phpBB forum site

2006-07-10T06:45:00.000-07:00

I have created a new site for free hosted phpBB forums at

http://phpbb.bizhat.com

Just added one FQA entry, need to create some more FAQ's.

Mail Server Setup with LDAP

2006-07-09T16:07:00.000-07:00

Last two days i was working on new email server setup with LDAP.

Installed OpenLDAP on local FreeBSD server, still can't get it working with qmail or postfix.

I have to read a lot of documents qmail and postfix as i may switch to postfix.

I have some experiance with running qmail mail servers. For new email server, qmail was the inital choice, but postfix seems better option, so have downloaded and installed it few times yesterday. It works well, no path is needed like qmail. qmail need patches to work, postfix is still active developement and work with out any patch.

Now need to get any of these work with LDAP. With qmail-ldap, if user is added to LDAP, first email will create required folders. Postfix, not sure it will do this or manual creation is needed. If postfix also auto create user folder, then i will go with postfix.

Today agnel moved his web site to BizHat CMS

http://kidsempire.bizhat.com

Builing MySQL RPM from source RPM

2006-07-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

On my Fedora Core 3 local test Linux server, MySQL version was 3.x

I upgraded MySQL with bindary download from MySQL.com

Few days back i tried to compile a program with mysql library and got error, it seems mysql-devel package is missing, so compiled RPM for MySQl 4.1 as per

http://fedoranews.org/contributors/tony_smith/mysql/

It take about 4 Hours to compile. On my FreeBSD server, it always compile from source when installing from ports, it seems FreeBSD compile is faster than rpmbuild, may be it have to do more work.

Portupgrade pkgdb.db: unexpected file type or format

2006-07-05T06:53:00.000-07:00

After upgrading FreeBSD from v6 to 6.1, i tried to upgrade all software installed on the server with portupgrade.

I start getting the error

[Updating the pkgdb <format:bdb_btree> in /var/db/pkg ... /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db: unexpected file type or format -- Invalid argument; rebuild needed] [Rebuilding the pkgdb <format:bdb_btree> in /var/db/pkg ... [Updating the pkgdb <format:bdb_btree> in /var/db/pkg ... /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db: unexpected file type or format -- Invalid argument; rebuild needed] [Rebuilding the pkgdb <format:bdb_btree> in /var/db/pkg ... /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db: unexpected file type or format -- Invalid argument: Cannot update the pkgdb!]: Cannot update the pkgdb!]
Command failed [exit code 1]: /usr/local/sbin/pkgdb -aFQ

The problem is fixed by deleting the pkgdb.db file

server26# rm /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db

Upgrading FreeBSD 6 to 6.1 on remote server

2006-07-05T06:23:00.000-07:00

Today i upgraded FreeBSD 6 on server26.hosthat.com to FreeBSD 6.1

You can find instruction on how to do the upgrade at

http://www.daemonology.net/

After FreeBSD upgrade

server26# uname -a
FreeBSD server26.hosthat.com 6.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE #0: Sun May 7 04:32:43 UTC 2006 root@opus.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386
server26#

server26# cd /usr/
server26# fetch http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-upgrade-6.0-to-6.1/upgrade-6.0-to-6.1.tgz
upgrade-6.0-to-6.1.tgz 100% of 4706 kB 864 kBps
server26# sha256 upgrade-6.0-to-6.1.tgz
SHA256 (upgrade-6.0-to-6.1.tgz) = 29075fc5711e0b20d879c6
9d12bbe5414c1c56d597c8116da7acc0d291116d2f
server26# tar -xzf upgrade-6.0-to-6.1.tgz
server26# cd upgrade
server26# ./upgrade.sh
Examining system... done.

The following components of FreeBSD seem to be installed:
kernelgeneric srcbase srcbin srccontrib srccrypto srcetc srcgames
srcgnu srcinclude srckrb5 srclibexec srclib srcrelease srcrescue
srcsbin srcsecure srcshare srcsys srctools srcubin srcusbin
worldbase worlddict worlddoc worldinfo worldmanpages worldproflibs

The following components of FreeBSD do not seem to be installed:
kernelsmp worldcatpages worldgames

Does this look reasonable (y/n)? y

Examining system (this will take a bit longer)... done.

The following files from FreeBSD 6.0 have been modified since they were
installed, but will be deleted or overwritten by new versions:
/usr/share/man/whatis

The following files from FreeBSD 6.0 have been modified since they were
installed, and will not be touched:
/etc/crontab /etc/hosts /etc/manpath.config /etc/master.passwd /etc/motd
/etc/newsyslog.conf /etc/passwd /etc/pwd.db /etc/spwd.db
/etc/ssh/sshd_config /var/db/locate.database /var/log/sendmail.st

The following files from FreeBSD 6.0 have been modified since they were
installed, and the changes in FreeBSD 6.1 will be merged into the
existing files:
/etc/group

Does this look reasonable (y/n)? y

Preparing to fetch files... done.
Fetching 4510 patches....10....20....30....40
....4250....4260....4270....4280....4290....4300
4410....4420....4430....4440....4450....4460
4510 done.
Applying patches... done.
Fetching 834 files....10....20....30....40....50....60
570....580....590....600....610....620....630....
780....790....800....810....820....830.. done.
Decompressing and verifying... done.
Attempting to automatically merge configuration files... done.

The following changes, which occurred between FreeBSD 6.0 and FreeBSD
6.1, have been merged into /etc/group:
--- merge/old/etc/group Wed Jul 5 14:06:12 2006
+++ merge/new/etc/group Wed Jul 5 14:06:14 2006
@@ -27,5 +27,6 @@
www:*:80:
nogroup:*:65533:
nobody:*:65534:
ltct-3142:*:1002:
mysql:*:88:
+audit:*:77:
Does this look reasonable (y/n)? y

Installing new kernel into /boot/GENERIC... done.
Moving /boot/kernel to /boot/kernel.old... done.
Moving /boot/GENERIC to /boot/kernel... done.
Removing schg flag from existing files... done.
Installing new non-kernel files... done.
Removing left-over files from FreeBSD 6.0... done.
To start running FreeBSD 6.1, reboot.
server26# uname -a
FreeBSD server26.hosthat.com 6.0-SECURITY FreeBSD 6.0-SECURITY #0: Tue Feb 28 22:53:43 UTC 2006 root@builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386
server26#

BizHat.com Adds New Programmer

2006-07-01T05:29:00.000-07:00

Today (1 JULY 2006) new staff jointed in BizHat.com as programmer.

He is working on rebuilding classified advertisement web site of bizhat.com

http://classifieds.bizhat.com

Present classified site have lot of spam, the new software will have option to prevent SPAM and auto posting by bots.

Now BizHat.com have an Alexa Rank of 3001

Mambo Upgraded to Joomla

2006-06-30T18:41:00.000-07:00

I was using Mambo CMS on my site

http://www.webhostingneeds.com

The version i used was too old, v 4.5 (1.0.1)

I tried few times to get this upgrade, but could not figure out how to do this with out errors.

Today there was a Mambo/Joomla exploit

http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/1698

So i descided to do some thing on my Mambo Installation, after several try, i got my Mambo upgraded to version 4.5.2.

Joomla is a fork of Mambo server, but seems more active than orginal Mambo, so i upgraded by Mambo 4.5.2 to latest version of Joomla CMS 1.0.10

Now i have to do some changes in Joomla template, so my site look better. Also thinking of installing some SEO MOD for Joomla.

Google Checkout and My CMS

2006-06-29T10:47:00.000-07:00

Today signed up for Google Checkout

http://checkout.google.com

Hope Google Checkout will get popular like PayPal soon :-)

Today i started designing of CMS for BizHat.com sub domains. What i have done is ported the CMS i made for www.scriptinstallation.in to handle multiple domain names. The CMS is basic, not much feature now. I am planing to move all sites to this CMS, presently two sub domains are pointed to this CMS for testing

http://qmail.bizhat.com

http://postfix.bizhat.com

The first real site on this CMS will be

http://mariasadanam.bizhat.com

This will allow client to update pages easily.

CMS is in beata testing, need to make more user friendly.

Auto Signup Attack on phpBB

2006-06-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

Today i found server that hosts http://forums.bizhat.com is down.

I tried to login with SSH, server was responding, but was very slow.

On login in i found server load of 20 to 40 and too many apache process. The one tak take too much CPU is MySQL.

I tried to restart the server, but on rebooting, again the CPU usage goes high.

I stoped MySQL and start watching the Apache log file and found

195.225.176.87 - - [26/Jun/2006:17:29:07 +0100] "POST /profile.php?mode=register&agreed=true&coppa=true HTTP/1.1" 200 30382 "http://www.google.ru/search?hl=en&q=free+porno&btnG=Google+Search" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0;)"

There are too many such connections.

The problem is fixed by blocking the user with mod_security

SecFilterSelective "HTTP_REFERER" "porno"

My First Experiance with Debian Linux

2006-06-09T13:02:00.000-07:00

Today i got an software installation work on Debian Linux. The software i used to install on Linux servers (Fedora, RHEL, CentOS). But i never worked with Debian Linux.

As usual loged in with SSH

ps519:~# uname -a
Linux ps519 2.4.27-2-386 #1 Wed Aug 17 09:33:35 UTC 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
ps519:~#

cat /etc/*release there was no files.

ps519:/etc# cat /etc/*release
cat: /etc/*release: No such file or directory
ps519:/etc#

cat /proc/version says it is debian

ps519:/# cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.4.27-2-386 (horms@tabatha.lab.ultramonkey.org) (gcc version 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-13)) #1 Wed Aug 17 09:33:35 UTC 2005
ps519:/#

The command used to install software on debian is apt-get

I have installed lynx to test it :-)

ps519:/# apt-get install lynx
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
lynx
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1855kB of archives.
After unpacking 4690kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://security.debian.org stable/updates/main lynx 2.8.5-2sarge2 [1855kB]
Fetched 1855kB in 2s (781kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package lynx.
(Reading database ... 27817 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking lynx (from .../lynx_2.8.5-2sarge2_i386.deb) ...
Setting up lynx (2.8.5-2sarge2) ...

ps519:/#

Thats great my first software installation on Debian Linux.

BizHat Wins

2006-06-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

On April 10, 2006 i have written about BizHat.com alexa rank.

Today BizHat.com alexa Rank is 3,476

In 50 days, alexa rank increased by - 4089 and wins over kerala's high traffic web site i told in previous post.

These days we are working on to get more traffic.

NetFreeHost.com free phpBB forums moved to new desicated server

Dual AMD Opteron 246
1024MB RAM x 2 = 2048MB
73GB SCSI Drive
2000GB BW
8IP's (Private Vlan; 5 Usable

This server have CentOS 4.3, previous servers are running FreeBSD. I changed to Linux after i found some instability with old AMD 64 3800 server running FreeBSD 6. Not sure instability is due to high traffic (server was serving 100000 page views a day). The server goes down for noreason, causing MySQL database corruption. Now on new server, everything is working fine, no down time.