WordPress installs multiply like bunnies.  If you’ve got several WordPress domains hosted on a single server it’s easy to loose track of installed versions.  This one-line wonder will sniff out WordPress powered sites and grab their version number.  Drop it in a CRON that runs once a month and you’ll get regular reminders of what’s lurking out on your server.

WordPress installs contain the file version.php with the variable $wp_version. Find all the version.php files, grab the variable and you’re golden. Here’s the basic locate command:

locate /wp-includes/version.php | xargs grep '$wp_version ='


That’s nice enough, but we can get a bit better. The server I’m targeting stores all virtual hosts in the directory /var/www/vhosts. We can use the cut command to snip that from the display, sort the output by domain name and email the results.

locate /wp-includes/version.php | xargs grep '$wp_version =' | cut -d'/' -f5,6,7,8,10 | sort | mail -s "WordPress Installs on Server XYZ" your-email@yourdomain.com

You’ll get an email with results like this:

foobar.com/version.php:$wp_version = '3.0.1';
whatsit.com/version.php:$wp_version = '2.7.1';
whizzbang.com/version.php:$wp_version = '2.9.1';
widget.net/wp-includes/version.php:$wp_version = '2.9.1';


For extra credit you could sort by version number, but there’s no need to be an overachiever here. Quit while you’re ahead. The script uses locate, so make sure you run updatedb periodically.

Ok, I’ve been using TimeSlips for project based billing since the DOS days before the web existed and we’ve always had a love-hate relationship.  Actually usually it was usually hate-hate. The interface felt clunky. Even after 15 years of use there were things I could never remember how to do.  Maybe it’s me, you say? Well Barb hated it with a passion as well.  Back when LineSight, Inc. was using TimeSlips Remote it caused us a never ending stream of pain, but we couldn’t find anything better.  We dropped TSRemote for the desktop version,  but billing day never rose to the happy day it should be.

I just got a new machine and vowed not to defile its pristine drive with the dreaded TimeSlips. The hunt was on.  We weren’t asking for much:

• A Simple, clean interface.
• The ability to define clients, projects and timekeepers who are either employees or consultants without sitting through training and changing our business model.
• The ability to enter time after-the-fact, or in a “meter is running” fashion from whatever device we happen to be on.
• The ability to easily see how much un-billed time we have.
• The ability to easily create invoices.
• We’re cheap.  This needs to FLOSS or pretty darn inexpensive.

A couple of years ago we helped a client with about 120 remote employees select Journyx, but that was also far to complicated for our needs.  Same for Replicon.  We did a quick survey of the FLOSS options available and churned through the Wikipedia comparison chart.

Ultimately we stumbled on Harvest. It seems to fit the bill perfectly. Within about 1o minutes we had all of our clients, active projects, tasks, and timekeepers entered.  Ok, Barb is going to  go back and cut-and-paste client addresses, but really we’re good to go.

We both installed  Windows 7 desktop widget installed and Voila !  We’re in business & all set on our 30 day trial.   More as the trial progresses…

Download Android for Kindle

Ok Amazon, listen up. I see your list of future improvements. You need to add “Share” to this list. I want to be able to highlight some text, hit share (just like I can in LOTS of other apps) and send it via email or post it on Facebook or twitter. If that’s in there now, I can’t find it. If it’s not, it should be. If you let folks send little quotes to people with a “check this out” note, YOU’LL SELL MORE BOOKS. I promise. Make it so. Please.

When configuring a Drupal-Ubercart install on a Plesk based host Ubercart requires the creation of a /keys directory that is outside of your document root (aka /httpdocs in Plesk ) To create a keys directory that does not generate open_basedir errors you’ll need to do the following

Log in as root and create or edit conf/vhost.conf and conf/vhost_ssl.conf as shown.

conf/vhost.conf:

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/httpdocs/>
php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/httpdocs:/tmp:/var/www/vhosts/YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/keys"
</Directory>


conf/vhost_ssl.conf:

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/httpdocs/>
php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/httpdocs:/tmp:/var/www/vhosts/YOUR-DOMAIN-HERE.COM/keys"
</Directory>

Note that Php_admin_value and all that follows should be on one line.

Then run (on CentOS – Ubuntu/Debian may be slightly different):

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -u --vhost-name=<domainname>

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

After the restart Plesk will include the contents of your file in the apache config file. You can verify that it’s being included by checking httpd.include you should see a line similiar to:

Include /var/www/vhosts/mydomain.com/conf/vhost.conf

Feeling adventurous and want to add other apache directives in the .conf file ? Great, but HEED MY WARNING. If you mess up the syntax in either of the files apache may fail to restart — That would be why you needed to log in as root. Delete-Remove-Rename the .conf files, rerun websrvmng and start apache. No big deal if you’re on a development box, but, as always you would be wise to follow the 2-Beer rule when logging into production boxes as root.

Resources:

Ubercart Keys Documentation Page:
http://www.ubercart.org/docs/user/2731/credit_card_settings

Plesk forum and Knowledgebase posts:
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=84211&highlight=vhost.conf+websrvmng
http://kb.parallels.com/en/5464
http://kb.parallels.com/en/432

You may want to check out Power Toys for Plesk from grafxsoftware.com http://www.grafxsoftware.com/product.php?id=172 which includes a vhost conf editing tool.

Of course you can avoid all this by having Aisle8, Inc. host your Drupal, Ubercart or OpenAtrium site. We can host it on a Plesk based server, or one of our trusty Aegir based boxes. Aegir eases the hosting and upgrading Drupal sites — Ain’t nothing else like it around.

"john.doe 333-444-5555"@myvoicemailsystem.com

so I needed to whitelist the entire domain.

While gmail doesn’t have a specific “whitelist” feature, turns out this is pretty easily accomplished with “filters”. Here’s how:

1. Log into gmail, click ‘settings’
2. Click ‘Filters’
3. Click ‘Create a New Filter’
4. In the “From” field enter the domain you want to whitelist, ie. ‘somedomain.com’
5. Click ‘Next Step’, then tick the ‘Never send it to Spam’ box.
6. Click ‘Create Filter’ and your done.

That wasn’t so bad. Anything sent from ‘somedomain.com’ now show up in your inbox rather than disappearing onto the great SPAM abyss.

You’ll need to be logged in as root.

First, Get into MySQL and use the Plesk database, “psa”:

mysql -u admin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow`;
use psa;


Query 1: List all the standard hosted domains, send the results to a csv file:

select name from domains where htype='vrt_hst' INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/domains.csv';


Query 2: Building on that, lets add client information and sort it to make it pretty:

select cname,name from domains, clients where cl_id = clients.id and htype='vrt_hst' order by cname,name INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/domains-client.csv';


Nothing earth shattering here, but it might save you 5 minutes.

Over the past few months I began to notice a steady erosion in available disk space on a server running the Parallels’ Plesk control panel. After some sleuthing I tracked it down to the management of mailboxes in combination with the “Mail Forward” and “Mail Group” functions on domains the “Mailbox quota” set to unlimited.

There are two basic issues:

1. Users setup ‘redirects’ or ‘mail group’ functions and leave the account mailbox enabled, then never check the mailbox and delete the messages. (e.g. sales@somedomain.com forwards to bill@somedomain.com and jim@gmail.com, but nobody logs on to sales@ and deletes the message)
2. Disabling the mailbox does not delete the existing files in the mailbox. All those mail files will just hang around forever, orphaned from the control panel.

• Query the Plesk database to identify mail accounts with mailboxes that redirect.
• Query the filesystem to find Mailbox directories that are large.

Query the Plesk Database

You’ll need shell access to your server. Login to your server, pop into mysql and use the Plesk database (PSA) using the following command:

mysql -u admin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow`;
use psa;

Use the following query to select mailboxes that redirect:

select name,mail_name,redir_addr from mail, domains
where mail.dom_id = domains.id and postbox = 'true' and redirect = 'true';

Now you’ve got some ammunition. Exit out of mysql.

Finding Big Mailboxes

A ‘mailbox’ in qmail is simply a directory. Each undelivered message is a file in that directory. On my installation of Plesk qmail is installed in ‘/var/qmail/’ The mailbox for ‘jimbo@somedomain.com’ takes the form: ‘/var/qmail/somedomain.com/jimbo/Maildir/new’.

The command below uses ‘du’ to grab the size of all the directories in mailnames, grep filters out all but the ‘Maildir/new’ directory leaving us with a list of all our mailboxes and their size. Running them through sort in the manner shown orders them biggest to smallest. Just the way we want ‘em.

Log in as root and run the following:

du  /var/qmail/mailnames | grep 'Maildir/new' | sort -rnk1 > mboxsize.txt

Sample Output:

1047680 /var/qmail/mailnames/somedomain.com/karyon/Maildir/new
123820  /var/qmail/mailnames/somedomain.com/vickih/Maildir/new
94156   /var/qmail/mailnames/somedomain.com/info/Maildir/new
88368   /var/qmail/mailnames/somedomain.com/kathyh/Maildir/new

Delete those Suckers

Armed with all the mailboxes that forward and a list of the big offenders you wouldn’t think this would need much explanation, but after several weeks or months of collecting files you may find you have to many files in the directory to delete with a simple “rm * -f”. Apparently there are limits to the number of files you can delete at one time with a wildcard.

If you run into difficulties with rm give this a shot:

CD to the directory and run ‘ls -al’. Note that the name of your server is a string common to all files, replace MYSERVER below with the common string:

find . -name '*MYSERVER*' | xargs rm

In your gusto to clean things out remember that there are legitimate reasons to keep a mailbox turned on for forwarded accounts, (The boss may want to be able to review mail sent to sales@ to make sure that leads are being followed up on, etc.) and some users may just get incredible amounts of mail. With that in mind this should help you keep a lid on things. Once you’ve got things cleaned out you may be able to use quotas to help the problem from repeating.

It's been dawning on me lately that simple things might actually work better. I believe the exact moment of this epiphany was when I was trying to build an Asterix box for the house. Our 2.4GHz cordless phones (or our neighbors) were knocking out the linksys WRT54G wireless routers I have scattered around. Something called "Asterix @ Home" (now called trixbox ) beckoned. Our home would have it's own multi-line VOIP server connecting us to the world. I just needed a Plain old phone to test some wiring. A trip to Family Dollar and $7 later and I had a working phone that sported a callerID display and a bunch of programmable buttons. That's when it hit me: My little family dollar phone had no power supply, no configuring, no patches, no upgrades, and unlike the VOIP box, it got a dial tone. A miracle, and for less that 10 bucks. Now I've freed up another machine to try to install Ubuntu on. No, wait.

Our new house has a postage stamp sized lawn. My move to simplicity really started a a bit over a year ago, a couple weeks after we moved in. The grass was growing. Not wanting to be the scourge of the neighborhood I set out to find a lawnmower. I would also need a gas can. Since, we don't have a garage, we'd need a shed to store the mower and the gas can. There were some very cool shed designs in an old issue of popular mechanics at the library, but the grass was really getting up there.

I'm now the proud owner of a 1930's vintage Montgomery Ward Reel lawnmower. It's been lovingly cared for by my 90 year old neighbor since it's original purchase, and since he has three others he thought $30 was a fair price. The lawn looks great. It takes about 10 minutes to cut. The mower fits nicely under the porch wrapped in garbage bags. Spray the blades of a reel mower with Pledge furniture polish, not 10W40 and the grass won't stick. It's simple. It was cheap. It works as well or better that its complicated cousins.

That brings me back to pepper. I've always loved the stuff. As a kid I thought it was great when waiters in restaurants would come around with giant pepper grinders. Great fun. I've had a succession of cool looking grinders, all of which disappeared during the move. A crisis. Must. Have. Pepper. This lead to the $1.39 cent purchase of the above picture "Best Yet" pepper. Amazingly enough, this stuff comes pre ground ! And ground to a powdery fine wonderful consistency never attained by any of my fancy grinders. And the taste…who knew? Chicken soup suddenly tastes like Grandma's.

I'm sold. Simple is the way it should be.

I’d pretty much sworn off Chinese food after a series of run-ins with the super-buffet’s common in the Midwest, and probably elsewhere. Our eastward move to a teeny tiny town has left us with damn few culinary options. After nearly a year, I wandered into Ming Moon, a strip mall restaurant squeezed in between the Rite-Aid and a Verizon store, and it was a beautiful thing.

Fast forward six months and I’ve eaten my way through half the menu and, but for the fried dumplings (don’t let them sit for an hour in a truck and then eat 8 of them), I’ve been in moo-shoo, won-ton glory.

Last week I found their 100lb secret yummy ingredient, sitting right there for all to see. Had I known that all these years it was not MSG that was making me feel all itchy and odd, but inferior MSG, oh the time I could have saved. Like bad drugs cut with rat poison, inferior MSG is ruining perfectly good evenings the world over.

And I’ll bet this is just the beginning…