Woke up this morning to a bunch of pingdom emails stating my site has been down. Turns out there’s either a security vulnerability with WP 2.7 or one of my plugins since my options table went from a few megs to over 2 gigs.
The excess size caused mysql to sh*% itself.
I can’t research the issue, since (mt) has locked the table and is researching the issue right now.
All I could do is recover a backup from an old backup to a new db then import the missing posts from the offending db. There’s still some quirks, like comments but it looks like intense debate figured out what to do there.
I’ll update this post when I figure this out. I sure hope it’s some bad code from a recent plugin update rather than a security issue. Regardless, I’ll need to look into this further.
I was having some major problems installing the latest stable release of redmine and I had been getting the error “rake aborted! undefined method `register_template_handler’ for ActionView::Base:Class” after running $rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=”production”.
I was able to resolve the issue and I wish I took better notes (or notes at all, using my bash history) so I’ll have to go off memory. And even though I spent countless hours trying – it’s worth it.
First, I wasn’t able to use the latest stable release on .7, I gave up near the end of this install and just checked out the latest stable of .8 and viola!
svn co http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn/branches/0.8-stable/ .
Originally I had commented out the rails version requirement in the enviroment.rb, but I uncommented it when I started this process.
Essentially I uninstalled the re-installed (removed and installed) ruby and all gems. I’m on a (mt) DV so it was good to install yum and break from the existing knowledge base FAQ about installing rails and a test app.
I used:
$yum remove ruby
$yum update ruby
$gem remove rails [got some error, which made me run]
$gem clean rails
$gem install rails -v=2.1.2
$gem install actionview
$rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV="production" --trace
[not sure why I ran] $gem update [then] $gem update --system [before I was able to run]
$rake redmine:load_default_data RAILS_ENV="production"
[could explain why my rails version was update after the specific version I previously installed]
Pretty ugly but it worked.
Here is my latest config.. Mileage may vary.
[root@scatter3d httpdocs]# ruby -v
*ruby 1.8.6* (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i686-linux]
[root@scatter3d httpdocs]# rails -v
*Rails 2.2.2*
[root@scatter3d httpdocs]# svn info
Path: .
URL: *http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn/branches/0.8-stable*
Repository Root: http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn
Repository UUID: e93f8b46-1217-0410-a6f0-8f06a7374b81
Revision: 2170
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: jplang
Last Changed Rev: 2146
Last Changed Date: 2008-12-19 03:45:33 -0800 (Fri, 19 Dec 2008)
I wish I knew what I was doing exactly, I was pretty burnt at the end of this cycle and I tried a lot of things. All in all, it’s a matter of certain version requirements on ruby and rails and redmine.
#Crontab runs this every ten minutes (root)
*/10 * * * * /root/scripts/redmine-rake.sh > /tmp/redmine-email.log 2>&1
#this is the script
One of the recent projects I gave myself was setting up redmine for project management. I’ve found it to be a great project management system and since I’ve been looking for alternatives to Basecamp-because of the monthly extortion fees-this one stood out. I’ll leave a review for another post but it’s the best tool I’ve found, much better than trac, and since I’m really familiar with it (Shane and Peter, whom I’ve been working a lot with lately, use the tool) it was an easy choice.
The choice may have been easy but the installation and parts of the setup were not.
One issue was getting a simple cron job to run the rake task of fetching email.
I was continually getting errors like:
/usr/bin/rake:9:in 'require': no such file to load -- rubygems (LoadError)
from /usr/bin/rake:9
Turns out when rake is run in cron, the .bash_profile file is not processed, so you must include the environment initialization in your cron script. I should have figured this out yesterday, instead I spent countless hours figuring this out.
Here is the cron I’m using:
#Crontab runs this every ten minutes (root)
*/10 * * * * /root/scripts/redmine-rake.sh > /tmp/redmine-email.log 2>&1
This is the bash script I’m using:
#!/bin/bash
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/rubygems/bin:/usr/local/rubygems/gems/bin
export RUBYLIB=/usr/local/rubygems/lib
export GEM_HOME=/usr/local/rubygems/gems
cd /var/www/vhosts/scatter3d.com/subdomains/redmine/httpdocs
RAILS_ENV="production" rake redmine:email:receive_imap port=993 host=imap.gmail.com username=redmine@domain.com password=redmine42 ssl=1
cd /var/www/[FULL PATH]/subdomains/redmine/httpdocs
RAILS_ENV="production" /usr/local/rubygems/gems/bin/rake redmine:email:receive_imap host=imap.gmail.com username=[username] password=[password] ssl=YES port=993
For those interested those settings are for gmail apps, so you’ll need to change them accordingly.
I just moved all of my sites off my (mt) dedicated virtual in order to get things straightened out. If you notice any performance issues, which you probably wont since you’re reading this in Google Reader, please tell me. I’m currently just on the (mt) grid. Yes, back on the (mt) grid after all that bickering before.
My master plan is to wash the (dv) clean, start out using plesk and see how far I go. I want to install redmine first and get all my repositories setup straight before I make the move back.
One thing I have to get working is the auto update functionality on my own server, since the latest WP update I’ve had problems getting it to work but determined it was the result of me locking down my server a little too much. But since I’m on the grid, it just works perfect and I can now see why it’s such a killer feature, since I just updated all of my plugins in minutes and downloaded a installed a few more without having to use s/ftp.
I’m still contemplating moving everything back, especially if the grid lives up to my expectations there would be no reason to move back any of the sites I manage – including this one
I’m going to hold off from posting a review of Media Temple’s (dv) (VPS) plan for another date, probably after I’m completely happy with the setup and I have some more experience with how they handle support and uptime.
So far the support has been outstanding. Currently I’m on the base dedicated virtual plan that (mt) offers but without Plesk. This was a major requirement for me in moving to (mt). Thanks to their awesome support they provisioned my system fairly quickly, considering it’s out of the ordinary option for their plans.
Right now I’m learning from a mistake I made when I first setup the box. I should have not rushed off of Spry (even though they were breaking at the time) and instead took my time to upgrade to CentOS 5 because of some issues with the older release.
MediaTemple right now is shining, they’ve given me another (dv) to setup and upgrade “correctly” and then I’ll be able to cancel my current (dv) after I migrate over to the new one.
This time around I’ll hopefully documenting a lot more, so here come the CentOS how-tos for Media Temple dvs
I’m officially on mediatemple now and after getting my VPS or (dv) cleansed of plesk I noticed Yum was not installed. I’m planning on doing a full writeup after a few days but for now I’ll get this tutorial on how to install Yum on CentOS 4 out of the way.
First off you’ll need to install a key from the centos mirrors,
# rpm –import http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4
Next let’s start installing yum,
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch.rpm
Retrieving http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
libxml2-python is needed by yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch
python-elementtree is needed by yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch
python-sqlite is needed by yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch
rpm-python is needed by yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch
urlgrabber is needed by yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch
As you can tell there are a few dependencies that need to be installed first. If you’re going to copy and paste these commands be careful,
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/libxml2-2.6.16-10.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/libxml2-python-2.6.16-10.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.el4.centos.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/sqlite-3.3.6-2.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/rpm-python-4.3.3-22_nonptl.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm
Wow that was a lot, now finally yum,
# rpm -Uvh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-3.el4.centos.noarch.rpm
And you should now have yum installed and ready to run. I won’t tell you how to use yum but the first thing I did was run,
# yum update
I’m ‘upgrading’/migrating my site over at MediaTemple and it will involve my DNSs to change, so two-point-doh site may be down tomorrow briefly. … Read More »
September 08
First off I would love to go into detail like Thomas Hawk has with his horrible experience with PriceRitePhoto but I won’t.
My horrible consumer experience is with 1and1, the hosting company I can no longer recommend and if you use them I strongly recommend reading this and start your cancellation now.
It all started 6 months ago when I wanted to cancel my exchange hosting plan with 1and1. I emailed customer service directly and they responded with a link to cancel services. I went directly to the site and noticed for security purposes they have you sign a form and fax it to them to verify that you want to cancel your services, understandable. So I did. 30 days pass with no cancellation 60 days pass with no cancellation and then 67 days pass with no cancellation and they bill me for 90 more days of service. During that whole time frame I emailed them over and over asking them directly to cancel the service and they kept responding with the boiler template of “please visit cancel.1and1.com to cancel any service”.
2 months ago (more…)
I recently asked mediatemple about ssh port forwarding and if they allowed ssh tunneling. Not only did they give me a replay the same day, a yes/no answer, but they gave me instructions to help me along.
Daniel,
We definitely allow these connections. If you need a walkthrough on setting this up, this might be a good place to start:
http://www.ssh.com/support/documentation/online/ssh/adminguide/32/Port_Forwarding.html
If that doesn’t … Read More »
November 21
