Stuff…

Any RPM and yum commands were hanging for me.  Turns out that the following will help this:

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.* ; rpm –rebuilddb

Whilst trying to install Ubuntu 9.10 on an old Dell Dimension 1100 the Ubuntu installer would start up and once it got to the stage to do the partitioning parted would error.  parted reported to check /var/log/syslog for more information.

The error was along the lines of:

Ubiquity: parted_server error while loading shared libraries /lib/libparted-1.8.so.12

Thinking that the disk may not be readable I rebooted and ran the check installation media option.  The media was apparently fine.

After failing with this process a few more times I tried the “try ubuntu” option which booted up the X server from the CD.  On the desktop there is an “install ubuntu” link.  Clicking on this link took me through the installation process and successfully partitioned the disk.

System is now installed and working fine.

Lots of articles online talk about how to get Plesk to pass PCI compliance, especially the TCP port 8443 which Plesk listens on.

From Plesk 8.x (which most of the articles are written for) to Plesk 9.x Parallels changed to another webserver (away from apache), so,  adding the /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.custom.include file and restarting psa does NOT help.

The main problem was that PCI was complaining about:

‘port 8443 pcsync-https with medium strength SSL ciphers’

In Plesk 9 for Linux to update this you will need to edit this file: /etc/sw-cp-server/applications.d/plesk.conf

And add the following ssl.cipher-list line between the inlcude_shell and index-file.names statements:

ssl.cipher-list = “TLSv1+HIGH !SSLv2 RC4+MEDIUM !aNULL !eNULL !3DES @STRENGTH”

It will probably work anywhere in the file, however, that’s where I put it.

URLs:

• port 8443 pcsync-https with medium strength SSL ciphers
• PCI expiring SSL certificates with Plesk
• PSA/Plesk PCI perl script
• PCI scan picking up various weak cipher suites

This looks like a useful mysql tuning script:

• http://blog.mysqltuner.com/

Otherwise the mysql.com pages are good for tuning:

• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/optimization.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/optimization.html

Was using Free PHP Formmail Generator : http://phpfmg.sourceforge.net to send the contents of a form and when sending to most mail servers/mail clients it would work great.  When sending to a Microsoft Exchange server the HTML contents of the email was displayed as text (not marked up).

Tried this with PHP4 and PHP5 and had the same problem.

The mail server on the webserver was qmail.  Testing the site on another PHP5 server with postfix the forms worked fine.

It turns out that qmail wasn’t liking the \r\n… it worked fine when changing to \n.

Updated the form.lib.php to look like:

#define( ‘PHPFMG_LNCR’, “\x0d\x0a” );
define( ‘PHPFMG_LNCR’, “\n” );

The test html email worked fine when received on exchange and viewed via Outlook.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php Anonymous (17-Aug-2009 06:29) said :

QMail seems to have problems with the “\r\n” in the header section. I found it helpful to replace them with “\n”….

$header = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\n" .
'Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8'. "\n" .
'From: Yourname <' . $from . ">\n";