Sorry folks we had a few ours outage there, due to a theme issue. I have been working building various templates and themes for some sites in Artisteer. It seems I got something wrong as the one I  created as a Joomla template and is working on the main site didn’t export correctly, most likely operator error, but will update this post if I find it is otherwise.

The good thing is WordPress is very easy to recover from such an error, I just had to do some sleeping for a few hours before coming back on line.

If you ever change a theme and it takes down your site and makes it inaccessible go to the wp_options table and find the template and css field and change the those to the theme you want to use. As then value in that appeared to be the theme directory name I used that and we were back online in a few seconds.

Just an aside the wp_options can apparently grow to be a problem and there is a plugin that can assist with cleaning out the rubbish A post here has a link to one such tool and some help.

So we are back online

See ya round

Peter

Taking a week off while Open World is on might not be such a great idea, but being disconnected from the net for a week was pretty refreshing.

Oracle has decided that Kernel development needs a shove, and has decided to release its own variant of the kernel for Linux. With what I can see there is no real reason to be concerned with what Oracle has done, the API fro the kernel still support the standard glibc for that level of kernel. Oracle says that if an application runs on Oracle Linux without the modified kernel then it will run on a system using it. Seriously from my way of thinking, if I run Oracle Linux, I can always run Centos or Redhat to support my non Oracle software.

I have been working with a site that has been looking at setting up a RAC cluster and the question was asked of me as to what should we do about this event. incorporate the kernel or avoid it. As the project is still in its early phases I have said adopt it and test it. There is always the fall back in the event of real issues being identified that provide a severity one bug case and no timely fix.

I will be doing some testing of the system with some other non oracle products to see if I encounter any difficulties.

I guess from the point of what Oracle does  with this, if they radically alter the kernel and stop other software running then it is always Linus’ choice to look to revoking the Linux License from Oracle on the basis that it is then no longer Linux. I highly doubt that Oracle is really interested in treading that path.

Summing it all up I think this is good for Oracle and good for Linux as sooner or later these enhancements will filter back to Linux

See ya round

Peter

I had never heard about the Tux HTTP server until today. I found out about it the hard way and it took some research to locate what the problem was. I am building a server for internal services running a suite of open source products to allow better collaboration within the organization. Joomla, Xwiki and others. I ran the Software updater to update all the packages and as one of the steps rebooted the server. This was done and I went back to working on the configuring Tomcat with Xwiki and never gave the web server on port 80 a thought.

Now it wasn’t until I was going to show the boss the software installations I had now done and when he connected to port 80 he got the Oracle XE license page. Very strange. I shut down XE and the page disappeared but I got a 404 error, I smell a rat. I tried and started Apache but it kept failing with an error about socket in use; address already in use make_sock could not bind to address 80. Back to basics of troubleshooting. What was going on I asked myself.

I checked my Apache config, stopped the Tomcat server and still the problem existed. I tried fuser and got nothing. It did not find any process running that had Port 80 held. Now I was getting curious. I checked Netstat  using netstat -an and nothing showed up. I am guessing you would be a little baffled, I was. I tried to telnet to the port, connected OK and then typed get and  had it return a 404 error. So some research on netstat as there must be a way to find this process netstat -lnp and I found an entry for port 80 in use, but its pid is – nothing to find a process. Thankfully I was able to find some information that pointed to the – being an indicator of a kernel process. What a HTTP server in my kernel. Ok that is new, I thought so some further research and I finally found an entry in the dmesg log TUX: 0.0.0.0:80. Off to do a Google search of Tux and I found a piece about Tux the kernel based web server. So I checked, yes its installed. I ran services command and yes its running. So next is to shut it down and disable it from run levels so it cannot start.

Now the idea behind Tux seems petty good. It is apparently very fast for a whole lot of reasons. It is probably very useful, however most of that I am doing is dynamic content and doesn’t need screaming performance. So for now Tux is getting its marching orders until I learn and understand more about it and what it can do and how to integrate it to my dynamic applications. So how did it get started when previously I had Apache running at that port, it appears that Centos updates of which I selected all to update apparently activated Tux for me. Thanks guys.

I hope this may be of use to someone and a lesson learned is that it is hard to keep up with many different products at one time. On the other hand good troubleshooting practices will be of benefit and allow you to learn about and resolve many problems even if you only have a good idea about the product, not expert knowledge.

Se ya round

Peter

Technorati Tags: Apache, Tux, kernel web server,

I have been working on building a new website over the last few days for a business and had a problem that I found isn’t well answered in the forums. The problem appeared when I went to install the first of the plugins I use to optimize the site for Search engines or doing SEO. The blog site is all up so I logged in as the administrator went to the plugins install and tried to upload and install the plug in and then found that I couldn’t do it. The problem was I was getting an error “cannot create directory” I couldn’t find what I was looking for as most of the information in the forums seems to be related to hosted server services. I was building on a self hosted service. I tried a few of the things such as changing owners on directories and files and found that nothing was working. Log files were a bit ambiguous. Then I started thinking about all my hosted sites I had built and came to the conclusion that this was not a WordPress problem and it wasn’t a problem with the WordPress plug in, but it was a problem with Apache. The problem it turned out was permissions that are default set in Apache to secure directory access in Apache. The fix was to create an entry <Directory xxx/xxx/xxxx/wp-content> Order Deny,Allow Allow from all </Directory>

Hopefully this is useful to someone in the future building WordPress on their own server or troubleshooting a hosted service that may not have been fully set up correctly and not compromise their system using bad choices for file and directory permissions at the operating system level. There is still an issue here that I resolved with 777 on the upload directory, I will be researching that more before allowing the site to go live to determine that there is no security issues with that. It is something I am not so happy about, maybe 775 will be enough.

Otherwise WordPress itself was a flawless installation as usual, Only have a plugin that has a problem but it might just need an update for 2.9 all my other plugins seem  fine

See ya round

Peter

As for what I use for SEO tweaks well check out this site here I also use a good SEO template as a starting point.

EU says U.S. comment on Oracle, Sun deal unusual | Reuters

The line in this article made me wonder as to what it was that the EU was trying to really protect with this deal. I originally thought it was SAP, as they had an arrangement with MySQL, however I see that they may have closed that arrangement in 2007, cant keep up with all the news. You have to wonder though at the comment “It could be very difficult for a competitor using MySQL codes to sufficiently replace the competitive constraints currently exerted by MySQL in a timely manner,” What competitor are they referring to if its not SAP. What other application companies such that there existence or failure would have ramifications within Europe to suggest that Oracles management, I wont say control of MySQL, would impact a competitor. Does BAAN use MySQL or some other EU application developer with a sufficiently large market share?

But then just as some were not entirely happy with Suns management of MySQL they forked the codebase to do as they wanted. The same will happen under Oracle if Oracle cannot manage the product for the betterment of MySQL and the community. Many will then commence migrating their websites etc to the fork as word extends of Oracles troublesome ways. MySQL will move on and Oracle will be left with a brand and there own version. Don’t forget and old adage, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. This would seem to be a great example of where Oracle will need to work hard to do just that.

I think it is a load of rubbish and the EU is stalling for an EU company and regardless SAP would seem to be the one with the most to loose.

If I was a shareholder of SUN stock I would be seriously questioning this and whether the damage that it is inflicting on the company warrants a lawsuit.

So EU fess up as to the real motive or step out of the way

See ya round

Peter