Admin

in may, we did a plesk migration from an older server to a newer one. it was relatively smooth, but for some reason, a lot of image permissions were not kept intact (instead being read+write only by the owner, but not the user or group).
i am beginning to learn how useful the find command is. this code snippet below enabled me to find all of the jpg images on my server that were chmodded 600 … and made them appropriately readable.
# find /home/httpd/vhosts -name ‘*.jpg’ -perm 600
but wait, you can execute commands on these results too!
# find /hme/httpd/vhosts/ -name ‘*.jpg’ -perm 600 -exec chmod 644 {} \;
good stuff!

this is a quick tutorial on tables port redirection.
we have a few clients whose outgoing port 25 is blocked by their ISP due to vulnerabilities and exploits that cause this port to send out considerable amounts of spam.
this is never an obstacle for someone who hosts on a linux server with iptables, because you simply can forward traffic from port 25 to another port (e.g. 26, as in the example below):
# iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp –dport 26 -j REDIRECT –to-ports 25
easy, isn’t it?
of course, if 26 is blocked, you can substitute another open port — but 25 must remain the same, as 25 is the standard smtp (outgoing email) port.
for someone who needs to utilize these settings, s/he would be required to go to outlook or whatever email application is being used and change the smtp port from standard 25 to 26 (in outlook, this can be done by going to tools > email accounts > view or change existing email accounts > select the questionable email account > change > more settings > advanced tab > change 25 to 26).
then, try to send out the email. it should no longer be sitting in the user’s outbox.
to verify that the change was made on the linux side, simply run:
# iptables -t nat –list
the output should show something like this:
Chain PREROUTING (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination
REDIRECT tcp — anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:26 redir ports 25

confirmed — it is working!
make sure to save your changes so that the rules are maintained between reboots:
# /sbin/iptables-save

this is a little off-color here, given that the target audience of my blog is intended to be the linux-interested crowd, but this is something i really didn’t know, so i figured this would be the perfect place to notate it.
outlook generally only displays the To and CC fields. what about if you need to send emails using BCC (blind carbon copy)? well, then you can simply press Ctrl+Shift+B to get the screen that displays the BCC field. then, type your addresses there.
that was easy.

i’m very much a command-line-interface kind of girl, but not everyone has shell access. hopefully, they do have phpMyAdmin, one of the most essential tools for managing your database.
the tutorial below gives you an idea of how to perform a database backup and restore using phpMyAdmin.
database backup.
1. open your phpMyAdmin webpage. hopefully, you have a link to it somewhere in your website’s control panel.
2. click on the database name on the left-hand navigational bar (generally in black text, with a number in parentheses indicating the number of tables in the database)
3. click on Export on the top of the screen.
5. check the option next to Save as File
4. hit the Go button.
5. download the *.sql file.
you can open this file in Notepad or any text editor and see the database schema with all of its contents intact.
database restore.
1. open your phpMyAdmin page.
2. click the database name on the left-hand navigational bar.
3. assuming you’re replacing the current database, you first need to drop all of the tables, so make sure to check all of the tables (the checkbox is immediately to the left of the Table column)
4. in the With selected: drop down box, choose Drop
5. now that you’ve emptied out your database, click on SQL on the top bar.
6. click the Browse button and locate the *.sql file that you created in your backup.
7. click Go.
you’ve now restored your database.
if you wanted to create an entirely new database with the same schema, simply open the *.sql file you created in your backup, and on the 7th line or so, you will see Database: `db_name`. just replace this with the new database name you wish to create.