MikeJ

Be careful using variables in your include. <?php require($content); ?> is very bad if you don't explicity define $content in your script. This is the most common mistake I see in PHP scripts that gets abused. If you don't explicitly define it in your script (or sanitize it), the variable can be defined in the URL, and you can probably imagine why that's a bad thing.

ns1.totalchoicehosting.com has address 64.246.50.105 ns2.totalchoicehosting.com has address 65.254.32.122

As far as Linux distributions that are pretty easy to install and configure, I've heard good things about Mandrake (although I've never used it myself).

Mutt rules! If you get stuck with Pine, lemme know. Never used it much, though. I was always more of an Elm and then Mutt fan (when it came out).

Submit a help desk ticket and we will review the possibility of adding options to PHP on your server. Currently there are no near term plans to move to PHP 5.0.x. It's still too new, and could potentially break numerous customer installed scripts/packages.

Forgot to mention, outside of bandwidth usage (which you get a warning at 80% automatically), all suspensions are done manually. How much warning you get is dependant on the issue. If your account is directly spamming (we can easily tell if it is), you will get no warning, just an alert that your account was suspended to the email address in your control panel. This has to be done this way to protect everyone else on the server (as well as other TCH servers) from being blocked by spam blockers. If it's another problem that's not significantly damaging at the time, we try to give some notice first. It's handled on a case-by-case basis.

You would only be suspended if your actual account at TCH was sending the spam, or your website hosted at TCH was being advertised in spam being sent from elsewhere (advertised, not just forged). We can easily detect whether it's your account sending spam, or someone else forging your account and sending it from somewhere else (typically called a "joe-job"). We don't suspend people for joe-jobs (we'd have to suspend the majority of our customers if that were the case). We also know the various email technologies and spam fighting technologies rather well. Basically there's only two reasons you should ever be suspended for spam: You are actually spamming or involved with spamming Someone compromised your account or is abusing a script you have installed and is spamming Those are the only two cases that the customer is directly responsible for managing. Anything beyond that is up to the customer (such as using technologies like SPF, reporting abuses, etc...). In all cases that an account would have to be suspended, the email address listed in your cPanel will be sent a notice (this is one of the reasons it's important, if not critical, that you use an email address that does not belong to that account... if you're suspended, you can't read your account's email). Becareful with SPF, though. TCH currently does NOT have SPF records defined which could cause you problems if you have SPF defined for your domain and you use TCH servers to send email (unless you are on a dedicated server).

Pop up blockers have no affect on the display in the upper right corner that says X New Messages. Keep in mind, too, there are three methods of knowing you have new PM's. The display in the right, the pop up alert (if you have it enabled in your controls) and email (also if you have it enabled in your controls).

mbox is a standard RFC based (standards based) mailbox format. Almost any mail client should be able to import it. On linux, it's as simple as placing the mbox file on your system and selecting it as a mailbox with your mail client. On windows, it varies by client, but I'm pretty definite Mozilla's thunderbird should have no problem with it, and I'd bet even outlook can import it. For that matter, you could even open the file with notepad. It's just text.

Edit your .htaccess file in your public_html directory and put the following line in it: >Options All -Indexes

If you have a domain pointing to your account here, the server and port for mysql in your apps would be: Server: ****** Port: 3306 If you don't have a domain pointing to your account, you can use the totalchoice name for your server: Server: serverX.totalchoicehosting.com Port: 3306 Where X is the number of your server (see your welcome message or your cPanel). The db name, username and password are what you setup in cPanel for each DB you create. Keep in mind that usernames and database names are preceeded by your account name, so if you cPanel login is "bob", your database would be something like "bob_mydbname" and your user "bob_myusername". Most of the apps you are using already will likely have the database server defined as "localhost". That's what you'll need to change. Hope that helps.

We're buying out all other hosting companies and creating a monopoly. Oh, wait.... no, that wasn't it.

Sounds like you installed an adblocker, or changed your hosts file to block ads on your notebook. It's a fairly common practice to redefine ad serving hosts to point to your local machine so that ads don't display, and the behaviour you are seeing suggests that.

mod_gzip is not installed on any servers. You can enable gzip compression through PHP as is mentioned in the threads Andy linked to. Some packages (like most php based forum software) even have an option to enable it in their configurations. Even the main TCH webserver is not using mod_gzip (but rather enables it per app via PHP).

There's a limit of 30 checks every hour. You should set your email client to check less frequently than once every 2 minutes (I have mine set to once every 10 minutes). Checking more frequently than every 2 minutes adds an unnecessary load on the server.

BASH is the default shell used by cron.

sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' should remove all HTML tags. For example: >$ echo "<HTML><B>Test</B>ing</HTML>" | sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' Testing So in your example above, you can add grep on the end: >echo "<HTML><B>Test</B>ing</HTML>" | sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' | fgrep -i testing

All TCH servers are Intel-based. (Almost all are Intel CPU's with the exception of at least one that is AMD opteron, which is still Intel-based). Server49 specifically is a Quad Intel Xeon 2.4 Ghz system.

You should continue to follow up on your help desk ticket as that's the official channel for billing issues. I can assure you though, that if you were overcharged, you will definitely be refunded the error. It just sometimes takes a little while.

It's not the best logic to say that 2 of 5 things not patched is worse than 18 of 58 things not patched. You have to take into account that Mozilla only has 5 things *needing* patches in the first place (and all but 2 were patched based on your numbers), whereas IE has 58 (with 18 still outstanding).

Dropping sticky as this version of guestbook hasn't been available in cPanel for at least 3 months. If you still have this version (2.2) that you installed via cPanel, you should upgrading using cPanel installer instead of this method. Gravis, did you manage to get your guestbook working?

Thanks for the suggestions so far. I'll definitely have to check a couple of them out. Just to clarify for a couple people, I'm not looking for web album publishing software (that's too advanced for my mother at this point... maybe in another year or two ). I'm looking strictly for being able to manage the photos on the PC primarily just to browse, print, and email them as needed.

That's the problem with a lot of people designing software. They expect people to want to become a computer geek, when really the majority of people only want to use a computer when it makes their lives easier, not more difficult. Otherwise, why use one at all? I agree it's good that people should learn more about their computers, but they shouldn't have to in order to use one for basic purposes. Most people who drive a car know little more than you turn the key to start it, you put gas in it every so often, it has an accelerator, brake, turn signal and steering wheel. Most of the rest they take it in regularly for maintenance to let the experts fix it for them. Many can't even drive a stick shift because it's different and more complicated than an automatic. Should those people be banned from driving because automatics make it too easy for them? The point the author was basically trying to make is that IE (the automatic) already works for the user. Why would the average user switch to Firefox (the stickshift) when IE still is easier to use? If you want to market to those people, you should try to make it easier to use. And yes, the concept of hitting return on a field to make an action happen is hard for some people to understand who only use a computer once in a awhile to email family members, and browse a couple websites, but whose lives are otherwise not focused around computers.

Wouldn't really ever be a problem. We would look at the headers (difficult to forge) not the from address (easy to forge) on any spam complaints. The SMTP protocol that mail uses really needs to be updated to counter these types of problems eventually.

Cron jobs only generate email when there's output from the process. The best way is to create the process that is being run in cron to only output errors. (Note: this is true for running programs in Linux and most Unixes in general, not just from cron.) If that's not possible, you can redirect regular output (and only get emails on error output) using the following format: >program > /dev/null This redirects (>) standard output to a null device (/dev/null), which means it supresses it. If you want to suppress all output including errors: >program > /dev/null 2>&1 This has the addition of redirecting standard error (2) to standard output (1) which is being redirected to a null device (/dev/null), therefore suppressing both errors and regular output.