August 4th, 2010
I’ve had a Linksys WRT54G wireless router for quite a while now, and it’s always been very slow when using a wireless connection through it – websites will take 5-10 seconds to load instead of coming up instantly.
I had never got around to trying to fix it until this morning (I finally got sick of waiting so long for websites to come up!!). I did a bit of searching and found the answer almost immediately – all I needed to do was log in to the WRT54G’s admin panel and change the “Wireless Network Mode” from “Mixed” to “G-Only” and it works! No more stupidly slow wireless internet!
December 20th, 2009
I tried to load up iTunes this morning so that I could put some music on to my iPhone and I was greeted with a friendly error message:
iTunes was not installed properly. Please reinstall iTunes
This was accompanied by “error 7″. After searching for a while and finding a number of different possible solutions, I remembered that I had un-installed QuickTime and installed QuickTime Alternative (http://www.free-codecs.com/download/quicktime_alternative.htm). I don’t like QuickTime and apparently you can make iTunes work without QuickTime as long as you install QTA. Apparently it doesn’t work.
So, all I had to do was re-install Quicktime and everything was fine again!
November 25th, 2009
One of my customers was receiving a “504 Gateway Timeout Error” when viewing their “Who’s Online” in their Zen Cart administration panel.
After lots of investigating, I eventually found the cause – the customer has a dedicated IP address that their website was running on, and the subnet mask and broadcast address for the IP address were set incorrectly – I must have set them incorrectly when assigning the IP address to the NIC.
Anyway, re-adding the IP address with the correct subnet mask and broadcast address fixed it and it works fine.
November 13th, 2009
One of my customers was getting this error message when trying to send e-mail:
The connection to the server has failed. Subject ‘New email address’, Account: ‘mail.example.com’, Server: ‘mail.example.com’, Protocol: SMTP, Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Socket Error: 10013, Error Number: 0x800CCC0E
The problem – some ISP’s block port 25 for all but their own SMTP server. I’m not quite sure why they do this, but it’s annoying! Anyway, to fix the problem, the user needs to either use their ISP’s SMTP server to send e-mails, or they need to change their outgoing SMTP port from port 25 (default) to port 26. You will need to ensure that your mail server is set up to listen on port 26 first though – it is quite common these days, but not all do. If you run a cPanel/WHM server, you can enable port 26 in Exim by logging in to WHM and going to “Service Manager” in the menu. From here, you can set Exim to run on port 26 as well as port 25. Don’t forget to unblock port 26 in your servers firewall!
October 28th, 2009
One of my clients was reporting that a few of their website users were seeing a warning page when viewing an SSL secured page with this error message:
sec_error_unknown_issuer
It appeared as though it was only a tiny number of people reporting the problem, and all of the users were using Firefox (but not everyone using Firefox was getting the error).
I tried a number of things that didn’t work, eventually re-installing the SSL certificate and that seemed to fix up the problem immediately. If you are using cPanel/WHM, re-installing the certificate is as simple as logging in to WHM, going to the “Install a SSL certificate and Setup the Domain” page, click “Browse” half way down the page, select the certificate that you want (it should pre-load all of the boxes), and click Install at the bottom.
August 17th, 2009
A customer contacted me today saying that they could not upload files via FTP, as they were getting the following error message:
553 Disk full – please upload later
Disk full – please upload later
Failed [Disk full - please upload later]
I found that PureFTP has a directive in it’s configuration file that stops files from being uploaded when the total disk usage is above a certain amount. The directive is:
MaxDiskUsage 90
To fix the problem, I simply raised that limit, restarted PureFTP and cleared out a few old files that were filling up the disk.
Problem solved!
August 11th, 2009
Ever since one of the hard drives in our brand new server failed before it was even in production (good start to a new server!), I have been waiting to monitor the RAID status on our server. I had forgotten all about it until recently, when I stumbled apon a nice little tool called mpt-status.
It was a little bit of a pain to install, but once I got it going, it works perfectly, and puts my mind at east:
[root@mars ~]# mpt-status
ioc0 vol_id 0 type IM, 2 phy, 278 GB, state OPTIMAL, flags ENABLED
ioc0 phy 0 scsi_id 8 SEAGATE ST3300656SS HS0A, 279 GB, state ONLINE, flags NONE
ioc0 phy 1 scsi_id 1 SEAGATE ST3300656SS HS09, 279 GB, state ONLINE, flags NONE
Perfect!
You can read a quick guide on installing mpt-status at http://www.gladsheim.com/blog/2009/03/13/building-mpt-status-for-centos-52/ . As the article said, I had to install the kernel source but it wasn’t too difficult.
June 8th, 2009
I recently tried to set up Google Analytics on our website. I got the normal page tracking set up fine, but I wanted a way to track customer orders.
I found this article on the WHMCS website explaining how to get order tracking set up using the Google Analytics “E-Commerce” feature. Great I thought! However, when I put the code on to our order complete page, the orders weren’t being tracked and I was receiving this error in my browser:
Error: ‘_gat’ is not defined
My Googling efforts weren’t turning up much – lots of results for the error, but most due to misspellings etc. I eventually found one result which was helpful to me. Apparently using document.write isn’t good and can turn up issues with ga.js being parsed *after* the rest of the Google Analytics code gets run. This is obviously a big problem 
The solution? Simply use this code instead:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://ssl.google-analytics.com/ga.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXX-X”);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
pageTracker._addTrans( “{$orderid}”, “”, “{$amount}”, “0″, “0″, “{$city}”, “{$state}”, “{$country}” );
pageTracker._addItem( “{$orderid}”, “{$packageid}”, “{$name}”, “{$type}”, “{$amount}”,”1″ );
pageTracker._trackTrans();
</script>
If you are wanting to use the non-SSL version of ga.js, then replace the first line above with this:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js”></script>
The above code is for WHMCS, but you can adapt it for general use – essentially, just make sure that you remove the document.write lines and replace it with a new script tag containing the URL to the ga.js script as a parameter.
