Spinland

I went ahead and opened a trouble ticket and got everything fixed up. Thanks anyway!

My domain hosted here is spinland.biz. For some years I've had the email handled through Google Apps and so the MX records were set up accordingly. Now I want to migrate back to hosting my mail on the TCH server and connect my Mac Mail client app via IMAP, but I'm having trouble getting things to work. I deleted all the Google MX records and added two new ones, spinland.biz at priority 0 and mail.spinland.biz at priority 1. Was that correct? If not, what should I have entered? For the IMAP connection, what server names and port numbers do I use? I can't find any IMAP specific (using SSL) setup instructions at all, much less for the Mac Mail app. The defaults (mail.spinland.biz for both directions and port 993) don't seem to be working. I've done a fair bit of googling but haven't turned up anything useful. Help, please? Many thanks in advance!

Okay, I think I answered my own question. I still had privacy through DomainsByProxy enabled on the two domains. I disabled that and then the next time I requested the codes they came right over. Guess it makes sense you can't really transfer a domain when it's so encumbered. Thanks anyway!

I'm planning to transfer a couple of hosted domain names over to DynDNS so I can host their web sites on my home server. I went through the steps to get authorization codes sent to the contact email so I can complete the transfer, but thus far nada. How long should I wait before I conclude there's some sort of problem? Thanks in advance!

Kudos for weathering this thing!

Ditto here. Did a WP updated as well as several plugins and everything went perfectly first time. That's certainly a welcome change, and thank you!

For what it's worth I have also had this issue for all the years I've been on TCH. The auto updates work sporadically, sometimes would take 4-5 tries until one would finally stop halting with errors like you describe (and the directories failed on would vary each time, so there's no single culprit). My only workable solution was to switch to manual updates. For updating the whole WP installation, download and unzip the package and check out the readme.html file. You basically only need to upload the new over the old (the config stuff doesn't exist in the new so it doesn't get overwritten) and then visit one URL (specified in the readme) within your blog where you can update the database with a single click. Done. Just be sure to do a full backup first. I usually FTP the entire blog folder to my desktop, just to be safe. For plug-ins, the ones I use only require I FTP the new unzipped folder up over the old one, and sometimes re-enable in the dashboard. Also very easy. Hope this helps!

Got it. Very interesting, thanks!

Sure, that would be great; thanks!

Okay, Bruce, thanks. At least I know to stop looking for another method!

It seems like the only solution is to have a sub-folder for the script to write into that has permissions set at 777. It bugs me to have anything globally writable like that but I can't think of a better solution, apart from maybe stuffing the file into MySQL as a blob instead of writing it to a folder. I did some more forum searching but didn't turn up anything useful.

Thanks, Jim. I did try several forum searches but didn't turn up that thread. I guess I'll hang tight in the hopes someone can point me to it.

Keeping a running monologue. Oh well. I've opened a help desk ticket to get the offending folder/file deleted, but I'm still in the dark why this problem exists. If the permissions on a folder are 7XX and I upload a PHP script via FTP, not only should the script come under my ownership, it should operate as me so the 7 in the 7XX should hold sway and anything it creates should also belong to me. Is this not the case?

Another problem: I can't change the permissions on or delete the uploaded file and folder the script created. I guess there's some kind of ownership problem with uploaded PHP scripts?

Okay, after experimenting it seems I can get the script to have write access by changing the permissions on public_html to 770. Is this a security problem?

I've set up a web form with an accompanying PHP script to allow a user to upload a file to the server, but when I try to execute it I get: --------------------------- Unable To Open File We're sorry but we were unable to open results.txt. Please contact your server administrator to be sure that you have the proper permissions. --------------------------- Is there something I need to do so the script can write? I would think if I uploaded it it would belong to me and the 750 permissions would give it write access. Thanks in advance!

Roger that, thanks for trying!

I confess I don't understand: config file for what application? I'm configuring my database access application with that exact information now. It's the same tool I routinely use to connect to Oracle, Sybase and MySQL databases for the military, and I've never had this issue before, hence my thought I must be missing something unique to this database. Also, shouldn't I be able to hit the IP address and port of my server via telnet once the remote access is enabled?

I'm not sure what I'm omitting, but I must be doing something wrong, for all I've searched the forums and thought I had a handle on this. I've gone into cpanel and added % for remote IP allowed (insecure I know but needed to make sure that wasn't the problem). The database exists, and I have the correct database name, user name and password. I'm prefixing the db and user name with <my cpanel login>_. My attempts to connect remotely with a database viewer application time out unsuccessfully. I then tried to test the connection by telnetting to <my_domain_name> 3306, and I get the error: "Could not open connection to the host, on port 3306: Connect failed" Is there some lengthy delay once you authorize a remote IP before it's allowed in, or am I missing something fundamental here? Thanks in advance!

Many thanks, as ever. :-)

Okay, and if I don't have a dedicated IP address for my system I'd have to set that up case by case, I imagine? Do you know whether it uses the default MySQL port (I think it's 3306) or a custom one? I write a lot of database access code in Java and Groovy and am thinking of setting up some databases on a site other than localhost to test things out more conveniently.

As always, you guys are great. All done, and thanks! I'm still curious: is it possible to hit the database directly remotely, like via domain_name:port? Thanks again!

On a related note, assuming there's nothing under cpanel for doing this, I happen to use DBVisualizer for numerous database operations and it has a wonderful database backup utility. All I would need is the direct connect information to hit my blog database and log in remotely. Is that information readily available? Many thanks!

Thanks. After multiple attempts I finally got wordpress and both plugins to update, so at the moment there'd be nothing for the tech guys to try to duplicate. Next time this happens I'll leave it unfinished and try them. I just couldn't leave the blog in the state it was in, sorry. Perhaps it would be best to learn to do the updates manually, myself. :-)

I've been using the cpanel "backups" feature under "Files" to back up my Wordpress database. Today I happened to unpack one of the files and looked inside, only to see the sql was only there to do some basic set-up. Nothing in there showed my actual blog content gets backed up, no categories, no posts, et cetera. So what is the facility we should be using to back up the actual blog content itself? I tried a forum search but didn't see anything relevant. Thanks!