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There was a bug in versions of Plesk prior to 8.

As some of you might know, I interviewed for a position at Google in April of this year.

I found myself in a peculiar situation last week.

One of the most frustrating aspects of CPAN is connecting to mirrors via FTP.

Working with the RAID configurations on Linux can be a little involved if all you have is hpacucli.

MySQL has quite a few cryptic error messages, and this one is one of the best:

I received an e-mail from Tim Linden about a post he made in his blog about backing up MySQL data to Amazon’s S3.

Normally, qmail will be able to process the mail queue without any interaction from the system administrator, however, if you want to force it to process everything that is in the queue right now, you can do so:

Upgrading Plesk from 7.

I finally remembered this book when someone asked me about how to get started with PHP and MySQL development.

UPDATE: The TRACE/TRACK methods are disabled in Plesk 8.

Before getting started, it’s important to understand why MySQL uses locks.

If you’re working in Plesk and you receive this error:

DISCLAIMER: Okay, technical folks - I’m doing this as a favor to the general community of people that aren’t very technical, but they need to know some tips for ridding themselves of a technical person that is harming their business.

On a Plesk server, the maximum size for an individual e-mail sent through qmail is unlimited.

It’s tough to find examples of dumps that can’t be properly reimported on other servers.

I really dislike qmail.

One of my biggest Plesk gripes is dealing with the Plesk Professional Website Editor.

Just in case some of you out there enjoy nomenclature and theory behind Linux filesystems, here’s some things to keep in mind.

A question I’m asked daily is “How can I find out what is generating iowait on my server?

I saw a ticket the other day where a customer received this error from Horde when trying to expand items on the left pane of the interface:

I recently came across a server that was throwing this error into its message log:

If you see a large mail queue and your system’s I/O is increasing, you may find messages like these in your syslog:

One of my biggest complaints on RHEL 4 is the large resource usage by the version of SpamAssassin that is installed.

One of the questions I receive the most is: “What version of Plesk works with MySQL 5?

By setting a certain bash environment variable, you can limit which commands are kept in the .

Installing new hardware may mean that new kernel need to be loaded when your server boots up.

If you have a new Plesk installation and the following option is greyed out in Server -> Mail:

Using Linux kernel 3.

I stumbled upon this peculiar bounce message recently while working on a server:

You may catch this error when you attempt to start dovecot on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

If you’ve used newer versions of Horde with Plesk, you have probably noticed the news feed that runs down the left side of the screen.

After a couple of weeks, my MySQL replication series has come to a close.

There’s a few final configuration options that may help the performance of your slave MySQL servers.

If you want to make a DBA nervous, just let them know that they need to upgrade MySQL servers that are replicating in a production environment.

While many people might find replicating over an external network to be an odd concept, it does have some uses.

On some occasions, MySQL replication can break down if an statement comes from the master that makes no sense to the slave.

In a perfect world, slaves will contain the same data as the master at all times.

If you have a master with multiple slaves, you can get some performance and save money on hardware by splitting data horizontally among your servers.

An often overlooked benefit of MySQL replication is the ability to make reliable backups without affecting the integrity of the MySQL data.

Although performance is a much larger benefit of replication, it provides some redundancy for your application as well.

MySQL replication can increase performance by allowing developers to spread queries over two servers.

MySQL replication may sound complicated, but it can be done easily.

I stumbled upon a server running Plesk 8.

After I was asked to create a stored procedure on a MySQL 5.

There’s a few issues with PHP 5.

One of my biggest beefs with Plesk’s e-mail handling is the lack of server-side filtering.

If your system abruptly loses power, or if a RAID card is beginning to fail, you might see an ominous message like this within your logs:

Apparently, a recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux update for ES3, 4 and 5 caused some Perl applications to throw errors like these:

A few days ago, I stumbled upon a server running qmail with qmail-scanner.