The latest security buzz this month is about the SSLv3 POODLE vulnerability, and how SSL version 3.0 is now officially designated as insecure, joining its predecessors versions 1.0 (unreleased) and 2.0. This effectively concludes the life cycle of the SSL protocol in favor of TLS. This post will give you a brief overview of what POODLE…
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Years ago, MySQL started allowing InnoDB to possess separate tablespace per table instead of a massive unified ibdata1 file. Tablespace is basically a logical storage area that contains table information – references, if you will. Every table, regardless of the storage engine, has one, and without it the table will be unrecognizable to MySQL. MyISAM stores…
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Mandrill is a transactional email service run by MailChimp, comparable to SendGrid. It comes stock with a powerful API for fast implementation into applications for sending email reliably over SMTP, but it can also be used as a smart host for all of your server’s outgoing email. The below instructions cover how to do this…
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There comes a time in every sysadmin’s life where filesystem errors just…happen. Luckily, these are somewhat easy to fix, assuming you don’t have a greater problem involving physical hardware damage. First, you need to know the name of the disk device having the problem. Do a quick df to see what device the affected partition…
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If you’re running CentOS, you’re probably a few versions behind on Python. Currently, the version packaged for CentOS 5 and 6 is 2.6. Contrary to what the title of this post implies, you actually cannot safely upgrade Python on any Redhat distribution. If you’re feeling brave, try this to see why: yum remove python Warning,…
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Updated 3/9/21 Setting up your cPanel server to send through a third-party mail server is very easy to do, if you understand the basics of how cPanel builds its Exim configs. You never want to edit your exim.conf file directly – your changes will be wiped out any time a cPanel update runs or someone…
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If you are running cPanel 11.28 or higher (which we hope you are, considering the current release at the time of this writing is 11.40!), you have the option in WHM to automatically disable DNS clustering if too many connection failures occur: While this can be a handy feature, if you have a…
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There are some situations where you may need to set up multiple shared IP addresses on a server. Some reasons may include grouping accounts per IP or lowering the effect of DDoS attacks if it becomes necessary to block traffic to a specific interface. Whatever the reason, multiple shared IP addresses on a cPanel server…
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Update: cPanel is no longer supported by cPanel for CentOS 7 or newer. It is recommended that you use cpanel4j. The below instructions are no longer relevant for CentOS 6 or older servers, since cPanel now includes Tomat 7 in EasyApache 3. CPanel has soon promised that Tomcat 7 will be supported in a future…
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In rare situations, the DNS zones located in /var/named might disappear. We’ve heard of this happening after certain bind package updates, or simply due to administrator error. In either case, it may be possible to restore or at least recreate the missing zones. Even if the server in question does not act as a nameserver,…
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