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rvt

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Everything posted by rvt

  1. I am 98% certain that no free host allows exec() because of the severe security hazard it puts on the system. I know a number of people who can crash a server if exec() is enabled. However, PAID hosting should be able to support you BlueHost HostGator HostMonster GoDaddy And my personal recommendation: FatCow They by far give you the most bang for your buck in my experience. Also, for anyone who decides to go with HostGator (still a good host, I just think FatCow gives you more) you can use the coupon code they gave me for my website. Just use the coupon code "TheHostHelpers" for $9.94 off your hosting package.
  2. Regarding your ISP's TTL: It isn't just your ISP's TTL that you have to worry about. You have to worry about every ISP in the world because they all cache your DNS records. So just because your ISP uses a TTL of 10 minutes, doesn't mean that my ISP uses a TTL of 10 minutes. I can name a couple of ISP's offhand that not only cache DNS records, but also copies of your website all in an effort to cut down on their bandwidth costs. This causes major issues for webmasters who make changes to their site and notice no change. Regarding running a name server on your computer: Obviously you can't use Apache to serve DNS records because Apache is a web server, not a DNS. Apache listens on port 80, DNS is port 53 (I think). So BIND or some other DNS software would be required. Regarding setting DNS records: You can certainly manage your own DNS for your domain by pointing the name servers where ever you like. You would then need to create an A record for youdomain.com (commonly abbreviated as @) pointing to the IP address of your site here. Then create a CNAME record for "www" pointing to your A record (which you abbreviated as @). Keep in mind that if Heliohost is down, chances are the Heliohost name servers are also down since they are on the same server.
  3. Based on other free hosts I know, Google is not lenient at all. Did they just ban your adsense account or did they ban the entire .heliohost.org subdomain?
  4. Based on my research Plone only runs on Zope. So without Zope Plone won't work and I think Zope is a no-go.
  5. I'm going to guess no because based on my research Zope is like Apache in the sense that it is its own web server. But I can't get to their site to download it and try so I can't be certain.
  6. The solution you present is the only option and even it has drawbacks. Lots of people think that if the server is down, then the administrators should post a message on all the down sites saying that the server is down but will be back shortly. Problem is, if the server can display that message, then it should just display the users accounts because all the Apache processes (which serve websites) are running. If the server is down, any sort of PHP, htaccess, etc redirection won't work because that will never be sent to the visitor (hence why your website is down). The only true option is to change your DNS. Problem here is, some ISP's like to save money by caching DNS records regardless of what you set the TTL to. TTL stands for Time To Live and is how often your DNS records should be checked for updates (it is common to use something like 1 hour or so). You can certainly shorten this up to something like 1 minute so that as soon as you change your DNS it is changed all over the world. Problem is, this puts a bunch of strain on the ISP's who run DNS servers for their customers. So some ISP's (and I won't name names) like to "cache" these records for longer than they are supposed to. I don't know if your school is affected by this or not. In my opinion, your best bet is to go with the school's server. That way, if there is a problem, lots of your classmates have the same problem and you aren't stuck up a creek without a paddle. But that is just my opinion.
  7. This is because Fantastico's php.ini keeps resetting to an old value and for some reason installing WordPress takes tons of resources. DJBob needs to re-increase the PHP Memory Limit in Fantastico's php.ini (not global user php.ini). htfu, if you are in a hurry to get it installed and don't want to wait for Fantastico to get fixed, PM me your CPanel username/password and I'll install it for you.
  8. I think there is a little confusion over what is trying to happen here. I have to say, I've read and reread this topic and it has taken me a while to completely understand what is happening. Based on the first couple of posts, I was under the impression that the OP was trying to use a program like Microsoft Outlook to handle their HelioHost email. Since their ISP blocked port 25, they can't connect to the HelioHost server to send emails. However, I don't think this is the case. I believe that the OP is running a test server (possibly XAMPP?) on their local machine. They want to test PHP Sendmail function but to do so need to configure the SMTP settings in the php.ini file (perhaps because they are on a Windows system which doesn't have the Linux program "Sendmail" installed). However, their ISP still blocks port 25 and therefore they can't send emails through HelioHost.
  9. rvt

    DNS Help

    Sure. I suggest taking a look here (even though this is designed to be done with A records on 1 set of name servers, not two): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_robin_DNS Nope. Because all that is happening is the DNS is cycling and could care less what is actually happening with the server they are sending the user to. To truly do what you say above you would need a VPS or dedicated server where you can run a CRON job every minute or two. This CRON job checks all your servers to see if they are online, if they are, they leave the DNS records alone. If one server doesn't respond properly, it removes it from the list. The problem here is with DNS caching. The way companies like Google do it, is they have dedicated "load balancing" hardware where they point their website to one spot and then that spot decides which web server is actually going to handle the request.
  10. rvt

    unknown domain

    Isn't it ns1.heliohost.org?
  11. rvt

    Prolonged Downtime

    Actually, I sent an email to DJBob regarding this during the downtime. (Not sure if it made it to you because I sent it to the Helionet admin email that kept sending me forum notifications, if you want me to send it elsewhere with my ideas just let me know). And this is what kills many small, free hosts. Communication is king in today's world and if people don't get the information they are looking for they pack up and move on.
  12. Seems as if you haven't set the name servers at your domain registrar yet. Once you do, give it 24 hours and you should be good.
  13. Glad to hear you got it working. As for how I found the solution to it: I am a programmer by trade and run a couple production level websites as well as my own web hosting so I had no problem going through the code to find the issue. In detail: I noticed that Wordpress was trying to load network.php from the wp-admin directory. I looked through that file and found where it was stopping when we accessed the page online. I then added a whole bunch of debugging "print" statements to see what conditional statements were being met to control output where it was failing. When I saw that it wasn't going into an "if" statement when it should have been, I looked at what it was testing (which is the piece of code I posted earlier). I then used that code on one of my local machines which I set up with the same configuration as here at HelioHost (at least, as close as I could get based on what I knew). Once I figured out which part of that function was supposed to return true, but wasn't, I tested that code here and saw that phpinfo() was being cut short. I then made the deductions I made above and djbob took care of the rest. Truth be told, he did all the hard work. I hate going through configuration files (especially PHP's) but I'll debug code like I described above any day. [shameless advertising]I and a couple other people I know do this full time at my site: http://thehosthelpers.com. I'd encourage you to join there and post if you have any issues because we check their literally 20+ hours of every day where as I only check here a couple times a week. It just so happened to be by chance that I stopped by on the day you posted your problem.[/shameless advertising] -RVTraveller
  14. Excellent, glad you got it figured out and that I could be of some help. If you need any more help just let me know. I can confirm that the Wordpress issues have been resolved.
  15. Well, I can't say specifically what functions Wordpress needs or doesn't need. Most blogs run on less than 32MB of RAM but the more plugins people have the more RAM they need. That being said, most people can run Wordpress and other HTML sites on a VPS with 256MB of RAM (this includes Apache, MySQL, SSH, FTP, etc). The code that Wordpress is using is this: <?php function apache_mod_loaded($mod, $default = false) { global $is_apache; //added by rvt: return true; if ( !$is_apache ) return false; if ( function_exists('apache_get_modules') ) { $mods = apache_get_modules(); if ( in_array($mod, $mods) ) return true; } elseif ( function_exists('phpinfo') ) { ob_start(); phpinfo(8); $phpinfo = ob_get_clean(); if ( false !== strpos($phpinfo, $mod) ) return true; } return $default; } ?> First it checks to make sure the server is running Apache (this part is OK). Then it tries to check if the PHP function apache_get_modules() exists. On this host (and many others that I've tested), this returns false. Therefore, it runs phpinfo() and captures the output in an output buffer. The argument "8" tells PHP to just print out the loaded modules in PHP's configuration. This prints out the same way as I have shown above (except without the beginning part which is excluded with the "8" argument). Since this gets cut off before it loads details rewrite, it doesn't realize that that mod_rewrite is installed properly. Thus, none of the conditional statements where this function is called return properly and Wordpress dies without outputting all of its information. If I uncomment the line in the function and remove the part that says "added by rvt:", then Wordpress works great. -------------------------------------------- Earnsimply.com: Once you have Wordpress 3.0 installed on your account here, download this ZIP file: http://thh1.thehosthelpers.com/wp3test/functions.zip. Extract the file (it will be called functions.php) and replace the current functions.php file located in the wp-includes directory. This should allow you to install the Networks feature...
  16. Nope, thh1.thehosthelpers.com is running here. www.thehosthelpers.com is running outside of HelioHost. I am aware about the php.ini policy, just wanted to test something with it. Now that you have seen its effects I will of course remove it... -------------------------------- EarnSimply.com: give me a couple minutes and I'll cobble together a Wordpress 3 install for you that should only be used here at HelioHost. Reason is that I have to disable some of the system checks it does here because of phpinfo() problem. It might work on other hosts, it might not. Difference is, here I know what the system specs are and I know they meet WP3's needs. Other hosts I can't guarantee.
  17. Hmm...seems not to be related to CPU load as now that it is below 4 it hasn't changed anything (but everything is much quicker and their aren't as many 500 errors so that is encouraging). More food for thought: In my public_html directory I have a blank php.ini file which I am using to troubleshoot this problem. With this custom php.ini file phpinfo() loads fully (http://thh1.thehosthelpers.com). The directory I have my test Wordpress installation in does not have a php.ini file in it and the phpinfo() does not load fully (http://thh1.thehosthelpers.com/wp3test/rew.php). If I put a blank php.ini file in that subdirectory then the Wordpress network page does load fully (as does php.ini).
  18. Unfortunately I have been unable to fully test this here because I have yet to find a time when server load is low (below 4). However, when I duplicate your settings on my local development machine (with practically no load), it installs without a problem. As soon as I can find a time when the server load here is low, I'll test it here. ------------------------ Update: this is affecting more than just WordPress. Take a look at your phpinfo file: http://www.heliohost.org/phpinfo.php. Easiest way to see the problem is to view source and then scroll all the way down. Notice how it cuts off in the middle of the odbc configuration? Now the problem with Wordpress is it tries to check the php.ini file to make sure it can rewrite URL's. Since the phpinfo isn't printing out completely, it doesn't find what it is looking for and therefore doesn't match any of the conditional statements. When I change the Wordpress function that checks the phpinfo to always return true, the page loads completely. Therefore, I am left to conclude that if you fix the phpinfo() problem, it should fix the Wordpress problem. As for what is causing this phpinfo() problem, I'm still researching.
  19. Only way I could get this working when I was testing was to get it set up properly with all the files and databases on a separate host and then transfer the entire thing here (and change all site URL's in the database, easy for someone like me, not easy for the newbies). I am fairly certain the problem is here with HH but I have no way of knowing for certain if this is the case because I can't get an error message out of it and the same files work perfectly where server load is low. I'll keep looking in to it for you guys though.
  20. Tony, Create an A record for your domain pointing to the IP address of your account here. Then create a CNAME record called www pointing to your A record (the A record is commonly abbreviated to @). If you provide your domain name, I can check the settings and see if they are correct. Remember, every time you change things like this it takes time for the rest of the world to notice.
  21. I tried a Fantastico install as well and it had the same issue. Very strange...
  22. I've gotten this to work on other hosts so I know it isn't an issue with Wordpress's code. And as far as I can tell Heliohost meets all the system requirements. If I had to guess, I would guess that the problem is just that the WordPress scripts are timing out because server load is through the roof. As soon as the server load drops I'll be able to install WordPress here myself and try it and let you know. Until then, that's my guess. You can monitor Server Load here: http://www.heliohost.org:2082/frontend/x3/status.html Try waiting for it to be below "4" and see if it works. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Actually, problem is that the server is cutting off transmission of the file part way through. And it isn't just happening with this file, it is happening with many WordPress files. For example, try and go to your Permalinks page under Settings. I get not text there at all and looking at the source suggests that the file is cut off. I'm still investigating...
  23. You should be able to create another DB user, add it to your database, and give it just the permissions it needs to read entries from the database (and not insert or update), but it doesn't really matter. If it were me, I'd just use the same ones because it is convenient and reasonably secure. Assigning read only privileges is more for when you have multiple people accessing a database and some people only need information from it and others need to update that information.
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