Michael Brandonisio

Hello,

I run a few cPanel servers and run Munin as my resource monitor. At the time I wrote this the version included with cPanel was munin 1.24. Ever since I have installed the plugin from cPanel it would monitor MySQL upon first install and then stop if the server was reboot. Uninstalling and reinstalling would once again get Munin to monitor MySQL but having to uninstall and reinstall just for a reboot, just did not seem like something that you should have to do. After many months of on and off testing this is the fix I have come up with.

1. Create a MySQL user with a password that is NOT granted privilege to any DB. Simply create the user.
2. Create a file called /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/munin-node
3. In the file /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/munin-node put this:
   [mysql*]
   user root
   group wheel
   env.mysqladmin /usr/bin/mysqladmin
   env.mysqlopts -u [MySQL_usr] -p[MySQL_usrpassword]
4. Then Save. Where [MySQL_usr] is a valid MySQL user and [MySQL_usrpassword] is it’s password. Note that there is NO space between -p and the password. This is critical.

Now what about 30 minutes to an hour to allow the munin-node to gather enough info to have something to graph. Then go view your Munin graphs. All of your MySQL graphs should have something in them.

Sincerely,
Mike

Hello,

I’m sure the internet has changed quite a bit since you first unveiled your web site to the world. The technologies used to build web sites and internet presentations have also changed too. You may be thinking that the time is right to redesign your web site. A new look/ feel and fresh content will go far to better reflect your business services today. Make sure you have someone who understands search engine optimization involved with your project. This is very important for a web site redesign.

In the past it was possible to simply write code to display your pages properly in the few browsers available. Today if your web site enjoys any traffic that comes from the search engines, you want to keep it. This means that your REDESIGNED web site cannot have broken links that come from the search engines or dump all of your old site links to the home page. Doing so will impact your search engine ranking. This will cause your rank to drop. For some business this could have a serious financial impact.

You need to redirect all of your old pages to the new pages that have similar content. Often a web site is transitioned from a static HTML web site to a dynamically scripted web site like those coded with ASP, PHP, .net, Cold Fusion, Java to name a few server side scripting languages. Your old web site may have had links that looked like this:

http://www.example.com/folder/products.htm

or something similar. Your new site may simply have restructured how the pages are stored by changing the folder names or your web site is now dynamic. Either way you want your old web page links to be redirected to the new web page links. If you are running apache server you can use an htaccess file in the root of your public folder to preform the redirect of OLD to NEW. This is just one way to make use of htaccess files. Feel free to use your favorite search engine to find other htaccess tutorials for password protected folders or event URL rewriting.

How to use htaccess files with apache server for URL redirect

Create a plain text file named: .htaccess

in the root of your public folder. In this file you will use the following structure to create a redirect that tells the search engines that a permanent change to the old link has been made, meaning the old link is being redirected permanently. The format is action, error code, OLD URL, NEW URL. Each redirect is on its own line like this:

Redirect 301 /your_file_name.html http://www.example.com/index.php?a=12&b=39
Redirect 301 /file_name.htm http://www.example.com/index.php?a=657&b=354&c=234

If your OLD URL happened to have a space, %20, in the file name or folder name put the entire URL in double quotes like this:

Redirect 301 “/folder name/file name.htm” http://www.example.com/content/view/215/27/

This will allow the directive to be performed properly. With out double quote around the URL with a space it can cause an internal error 500 on the server. Often this error is associated with htaccess files the have invalid syntax.

Note:

1. 301 is the error code for a permanent redirect
2. The OLD URL starts with a forward slash
3. The NEW URL is a fully qualified URL
4. The new URL can also be on a different domain too.

That is all there is to it. Save your htaccess file and test it by access an old URL. It should redirect your browser without incident. Using the 301 error tells the search engines to update their index with the new URL.

Sincerely,
Mike

Hello,

I recently upgraded my servers to the cpanel 11 when I received a notice from cpanel that stated, “Unable to automaticlly update the mailer config…”. So I manually performed the upgrade only to discover that email was being handled very differently after the upgrade. No email that was marked as SPAM was was being delivered. Instead it was being dropped. This meant that there would be no way to check for a false positive email marked as SPAM. Normally spammy email has it’s subject rewritten to prefixed with, “[spam]”. This allowed the user to then use a filter in their email client to filter email with “[spam]” in the subject to a folder for later review. This would keep the inbox clean.

I did some research and found that this was a common issue with the new cPanel 11. After many hours of thinking that I may have to downgrade the server to cPanel 10, I found my answer in WHM. When you log into WHM as root there is a section called, “Service Configuration”. In this section you will find, “Exim Configuration Editor”.

In the “Exim Configuration Editor” page in the, “Mail” section just above the the buttons marked, “Visualized ACLs and Save” is an option to use the old old transport, “Use the old transport based spamassassin system instead of the new acl style one. (not recommended, slow)”. When I first saw this and it said it was not recommended I looked for an alternative. I could not find one. I need my email spammy or not to be delivered to each users inbox for their review.

Check this option, “Use the old transport based spamassassin system instead of the new acl style one. (not recommended, slow)” and click the save button. If you were previously using subject rewrites SPAM Assassin will again rewrite your subjects. You can also make use tof the X-Spam-Flag header for filtering this is a YES or NO value.

At least by doing this you can continue to make use of the NEW cPanel 11 features while monitoring the cPanel forums to see of the Exim ACL’s have been fixed to allow subject rewrites and delivery of email marked as SPAM.

Sincerely,
Mike