XPC Design » Tech

Moved your Magento install, admin section broken

Ryan — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 08:06:07 +0000

If you’ve moved your Magento install to another folder and assume you’ve covered all your bases, but for some reason the admin section just won’t work, then I have a fix for you. Specifically if you can log into the admin section, but once you click on any link it gives you an error.

My first suggestion would be to enable error logs first to see what the error is. Usually this can be done by going to the /errors folder and renaming local.xml.sample to local.xml. Make sure you return it to its original state when you’re done due to security reasons. The error page should give a full print out of what’s wrong.

If you see “Could not determine temp directory, please specify a cache_dir manually”

Find and edit this file: /lib/Zend/Cache/Backend/File.php
Find the ‘cache_dir’ setting.
Modify it so it looks like: ‘cache_dir’ => ‘var/tmp’,

Credit to ScreencastWorld for pointing me in the right direction.

Make More Room in Google Calendar for Automatically Updating iCal Feeds

Ryan — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 18:32:06 +0000

Go to your calendar settings and set your 4 day custom calendar to either 2 or 3 weeks depending on how much space you need per day. That calendar will morph into the style of the monthly calendar, just with more space for events.

Then you can use awesome custom iCal feeds that automatically update, like:

Movies & TV:

DVD Movies
Blu-ray Movies
Custom TV Show Schedule This one is a bit more difficult and requires you to host a php script on a web server (which I can provide through my hosting company), but it’s my favorite and the single most useful thing I’ve ever added to my Google Calendar (I used to track TV shows manually before).

Games:

Music:

If you’re a last.fm user, they have iCal links for recommended concerts and events in your area, but their new album releases section only has an RSS feed.

Note: Google already has sports teams (with live score updates), holidays, birthdays, etc. built right in to the “Add interesting calendars” option.

Nagios SSL/Connection Issue Solved

Ryan — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:33:31 +0000

On /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg, (remote server) comment out the following line:

#allowed_hosts=

They say it ignores this config line if you use xinet.d, but they are totally wrong. I used to get the “Host is not allowed to talk to us!” error because of this.

The command I used to test the connection (on the host server) is:

/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H

Linux Commands and Paths for a Plesk Server

Ryan — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:37:54 +0000

This is my on-going cheat sheet of Linux commands for my Plesk server running on CentOS 5. I will keep updating this as I go on. Read more to see the list:

Restarting Firewall

/etc/rc.d/init.d/psa-firewall stop
/etc/rc.d/init.d/psa-firewall start

Restart Plesk

/etc/init.d/psa stop
/etc/init.d/psa start

Restart MySQL

/etc/init.d/mysqld restart

Optimize all MySQL databases and tables

mysqlcheck -Ao -u username -ppassword (Optimize all)
mysqlcheck -Aa -u username -ppassword (Just analyze)
mysqlcheck -Aao -auto-repair -u username -ppassword (Analyze, repair and optimize)

Run Logwatch

logwatch –print –detail High –archives –range All

Change Ownership

chown user:group /some/folder
chown user:group /some/folders-and-the-files-inside/*

Copy Contents of a Folder to Another

cp -r /some/folders-and-the-files-inside/* /some/folder

Check Sub-folder Sizes in the Current Folder

du -sh *

Check Total Size of a Folder

du -sh

List Partitions and Drive Space Usage

df -k

Splunk Commands

/opt/splunk/bin/splunk stop

SMARTd Commands for SATA Drives

Ryan — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:22:47 +0000

Show all SMART information

smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda1

-a = Show all SMART information for device.
-d = Specify the device type to one of: ata, scsi, marvell, 3ware (ata is selected above).
/dev/sda1 = The drive.

Run a self-test

smartctl -d ata -t offline /dev/sda1

smartctl -d ata -t long /dev/sda1

Output self-test and other log results

smartctl -d ata -l selftest /dev/sda1
smartctl -d ata -l error /dev/sda1
smartctl -d ata -l selective /dev/sda1
smartctl -d ata -l directory /dev/sda1

Output all options

smartctl -h

Misc

Enable smart by editing /etc/smartd.conf file.
Smart Configuration file: /etc/smartd.conf
Start/Stop smart: /etc/init.d/smartd start | stop