Plesk 8 Upgrade

Real Estate Webmasters has upgraded one of our Rackspace servers to use Plesk 8. It went really well and did not cause any noticable downtime. Some of the new features are pretty cool. The one feature that I was most interested in was the Interface Control Management. Plesk 8 introduces the concept of client interface templates, which eliminates the need to adjust interface settings on a per-client basis. This can considerably speed up your client interface management.

SOA DNS records management

This feature is cool as previously with Plesk we could not easily manage DNS Settings TTL's and other DNS fine-tuning options. I'll update this entry with the Advantages and Disadvantages of using Plesk as a control panel. Read Full Post

How to set the hosts file in Windows.

If you are moving your site to a new server and want to view your site before you've switched the DNS you can do this by editing the hosts file in windows XP pro.

1) Open the file c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

2) Add the IP of the new server and the URL. When we moved realestatewebmasters.com here was the entry in my hosts file.

127.0.0.1       localhost
72.32.191.116   www.realestatewebmasters.com

Then I closed all my browser windows and opened realestatewebmasters.com to verify that the move was successful.

Once verified I added removed that line from the hosts file.

 

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By adding the following to proftpd.conf, you can now see hidden files by default:

ListOptions "-a"


Then Just restart proftpd and your all set. Read Full Post

Host Email on different server with Plesk

Managing DNS with Plesk is pretty basic. If you want to configure an account to host mail on a server outside of the one the website is hosted on follow these easy steps.

1) Obtain the mail MX records.
2) In Plesk Remove the current MX records and add the new ones.
3) Go into Mail and Click the Disable Switch.

This last step is very important for the contact forms to work properly. If you do not disable the mail the server will attempt the deliver your contact forms internally - and of course it cannot. Read Full Post

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3

In the office, a while back I set up a Linux Box for Internal use.  This server is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 on a Compaq. It's doesn't serve many web pages except for some internal pages programmers use. It is also being used as a backup location for other Windows workstations around the Office. I use it to back up my email and other important files over the Samba share. The Server needs another HD. I would like to get a 200G HD so I can really back up everyones email.
I found some scripts that I would like to test out here

Backing Up Windows Machines to a Linux Host

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This is where I will post my observations on the REW blogs and ways that we can improve the usability of the system. Overall It's been good so far.
Great Job Morgan for the planning and direction of this project. And of course Mike for the fine programming.

Placing a post in a category is not obvious.
Ok - Makes sense now that I have more categories, I realized that I must have the name of the category selected. This became obvious because the categories were located in a select box menu. Read Full Post

Linux/Apache

My home PC I run a Linux Desktop (KD3) for a few years now.  Linux is the OS of choice for running web servers.  I will share what I learned along the way about linux.

Everyday Linux Commands

If your server is experiencing trouble first thing to check is the disk space. Linux gets cranky if it runs out of disk space. To do this type:

df -h  ( the h makes it "human readable" )
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