The May issue of Communications of the ACM contained a very interesting article called “Why Cloud Computing Will Never Be Free”. It sometimes reads like an ad for the service that the author’s company offers, but it’s still an in-depth presentation of why the cloud computing price war has resulted in services that cut corners. Buyers beware!
If you’ve tried running WordPress on Bluehost, you may have run into this: you change your Permalink Settings, and the site no longer works. You get “403 Permission Denied”.
The fix is pretty simple. Just edit the .htaccess file in the blog’s root directory and add the line Options +FollowSymlinks. I put it after <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> because that was suggested by the article that I found on the interwebs.
I don’t know why I’ve only had to do this with Bluehost, but their tech support told me that they don’t have any plans to fix whatever the underlying issue is.
I was trying to use Akeeba Backup (formerly “JoomlaPack”) to move a Joomla site from a temporary location under my personal site to its own hosting account. The site packed up fine, but I got the error “Could not open logs/index.html for writing” when unpacking with kickstart.php.
A little research revealed that you sometimes get this error when unpacking to a hosting account’s root folder. You can get past this by unpacking to a subdirectory and then moving the files to the root. It looks to me like my host, 1and1, wasn’t allowing the kickstart scripts to write to the logs folder. I couldn’t figure out how to fix the permissions, so I used the subdirectory workaround. After unpacking everything to a subfolder and then moving it to the root, I just needed to change two paths in configuration.php and the site was working. I never was able to move logs/index.html to the main logs folder, but the site is working fine without it.
I did need to follow one important tip in the Akeeba Backup manual and force “binary mode” when transferring the site’s .jpa archive file down from the original host and up to the new site.
to amaze your friends…
We are using the free Comodo antivirus product in our not-for-profit office.? It seems to work pretty well, but the updater is failing on many of our machines.
I think I’ve narrowed the issue down to the fact that we used to have a proxy server.? Even though I removed the group policy that configured Internet settings to look for the proxy, and IE and Firefox can reach the Internet just fine, the “.DEFAULT” user section of the registry is still pointing to the proxy server, and Comodo won’t update.? Nothing that I’ve found will change the .DEFAULT user Internet settings — I edit the registry, and then it reverts back.
I found a registry hack to turn on per-machine proxy settings for XP.? That did the trick!? Here’s what goes in a .reg file that you can double-click to import:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
"ProxySettingsPerUser"=dword:00000000
Now I just need to see if a similar fix is available for Vista…
It seems to work for Vista, too!
This looks very interesting.? I don’t see it in the Android Marketplace yet, perhaps because my phone is not running Android 2.0.
We’re using mod_auth_cas on a linux reverse proxy to authenticate users to our DotNetNuke (DNN) intranet site.? After dealing with the entropy problem that was really slowing down access, we had just one problem remaining:? files that were attached to DNN pages with the built-in editor were not accessible through the reverse proxy.
It turns out that DNN uses a “fileticket” parameter in the file link URLs, and mod_auth_cas uses a “ticket” parameter.? But mod_auth_cas was mistakenly stripping out DNN’s fileticket parameters.? A DNN URL would look like this: “/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=DBDQlsksjlefwgb&tabid=70″.? After going through the reverse proxy, mod_auth_cas had mangled it to “/LinkClick.aspx?filetabid=70″.
Someone involved with mod_auth_cas pointed me to the bug tracker, and there was a fix for the URL mangling.? You need to get the latest source files, compile them, and the issue is gone!
Can’t wait until this kind of thing becomes widespread!
Listening to This Week in Google (TWIG episode 3, I’m a little behind) created an “ah-ha” moment for me today.? I used to always feel like I have to read every Facebook status update or Tweet that my friends post.? Of course I can’t keep up, but I keep wanting to try.
They made the analogy on TWIG that Facebook status updates and Tweets are like a constantly running party.? When you show up late for a party, you don’t say, “Tell me about all the conversations that I missed”.? You just jump in for as much time as you have.
That takes a load off.
