AMW Sites Blog

Plesk, also known as PSA (for Plesk Server Administrator), is a web hosting program package provided by Parallels Inc.

Log file locations:

/usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog

Useful links:

http://stevejenkins.com/blog/2011/06/fixing-postfix-certificate-verification-failed-for-gmail-untrusted-issuer-error-message/ – good for fixing issue with sending emails to Gmail accounts on a new Plesk install

For those of you who need to optimize some MySQL queries, you may have already tried doing a Google search and found some references to MySQL’s EXPLAIN command. So now you know the command, but what does it all mean? Well, here’s a great article explaining EXPLAIN on DevShed!

For those who have worked with MySQL databases before, you may have used the

SHOW PROCESSLIST

to monitor what’s going on with a database. By running

SHOW PROCESSLIST

, the following bits of information are displayed:

• the connection identifier
• the MySQL user who is issuing the statement
• the hostname of the client issuing the statement
• the selected database if there is one, or NULL if there isn’t one selected
• the type of command that is being executed
• amount of time that has lapsed that the thread has been in its current state
• an action, event, or state that indicates what the thread is doing
• the statement that is being run, or NULL if nothing is currently being executed

But what about Postgres? What is the Postgres equivalent?

The answer:

SELECT * from pg_stat_activity ;

After enabling counter-measures to fight comment spam, on the following day, the website started to receive a noticeable surge in trackback spam. It was enough such that it almost was a backlash to the anti-comment spam measures.

After doing more research on how to combat trackback spam, the blog now has Simple Trackback Validation plugin installed.

Now, let’s see what spam techniques will be used on the site next.

On occasion, we’re still receiving spam comments on our blog. I found an article on maketecheasier.com with some more techniques that are worth trying.

Technique #5 on their list is: Use a Custom WordPress Function to Ban Empty Referrers

I’ve spot checked the Apache access logs and looked for the IP address of today’s comment spam to confirm whether or not the referrer was empty, and they were empty!

As per the instructions, I went ahead and modified my current theme’s functions.php file and copy and pasted the referer check code that they had mentioned.

Now we play the waiting game…

P.S. I just emptied my Spam Comments – there were 125 of them.

For all of those Grails developers who are in need of a quick look-up table for the database migration plugin commands, here they are:

• grails dbm-changelog-sync
• grails dbm-changelog-sync-sql
• grails dbm-changelog-to-groovy
• grails dbm-clear-checksums
• grails dbm-create-changelog
• grails dbm-db-doc
• grails dbm-diff
• grails dbm-drop-all
• grails dbm-future-rollback-sql
• grails dbm-generate-changelog
• grails dbm-generate-gorm-changelog
• grails dbm-gorm-diff
• grails dbm-list-locks
• grails dbm-mark-next-changeset-ran
• grails dbm-register-changelog
• grails dbm-release-locks
• grails dbm-rollback
• grails dbm-rollback-count
• grails dbm-rollback-count-sql
• grails dbm-rollback-sql
• grails dbm-rollback-to-date
• grails dbm-rollback-to-date-sql
• grails dbm-status
• grails dbm-tag
• grails dbm-update
• grails dbm-update-count
• grails dbm-update-count-sql
• grails dbm-update-sql
• grails dbm-validate

In a continuous effort to get you, our visitor, to our content as quickly as possible, we have decided to install the WP Super Cache plugin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/installation/

The idea is to generate a cache, consisting of many HTML files containing the website content, and to relieve the load off of the web server, by having it serve those static HTML files instead of dynamically generating the HTML through a combination of executing PHP code and fetching information from the MySQL database.

Serving the HTML file should be faster because the web server does not need to parse and execute PHP code and does not need to fetch additional information from the MySQL database.

Let’s see if this makes a difference…

For those who have just picked up Grails and are wanting to learn more about it, you’re in for a little surprise when you get to parts that talk about the front-end. This is because once you learn about SiteMesh and want to get into the nitty-gritty details about it, you run into a roadblock.

Grails is still using SiteMesh 2, but the docs for this have disappeared!

If you go to the SiteMesh website at http://www.sitemesh.org/ – you will see the documentation for SiteMesh 3.

If you go to the former SiteMesh website by OpenSymphony at http://www.opensymphony.com/, you will get their unfortunate landing page announcing OpenSymphony’s demise.

Luckily, we’ve found a link to the old JavaDocs for SiteMesh version 2.

http://www.opensymphony.com/sitemesh/api/index.html?overview-summary.html

Here is information on how to move the newsletter box from the footer to somewhere else within your Magento layout:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/25371/

Remove footer elements from your Magento store, such as the site map, search terms, and advanced search links:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/9347/

Ran into an issue while trying to import a database SQL file.

ERROR 1153: Got a packet bigger than ‘max_allowed_packet’ bytes

One way to fix this is to update the max_allowed_packet setting on the MySQL server.

1. Edit your my.cnf file
2. Add something like this
   [mysqld]
max_allowed_packet=16M

3. Restart MySQL

You can verify your previous and new max_allowed_packet setting by logging into MySQL and running the SHOW VARIABLES command.

Note, this information was complied by looking at:

http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?35,75794,261640#msg-261640