HCSuperStores

I hate it when that happens. Yesterday I thought I was having server problems because when I tried to access my databases the window wouldn't come up. Silly me, I already HAD a window with the databases open! I had them close and delete the thread due to my own stupidity! Nothing like showing up to class wearing just your underwear!

Hi! I'm a customer (reseller package) and I'll answer what I can for you and let a TCH tech answer the rest. 1) You are responsible for transfering your site generally. If you have access you can change your DNS information to the TCH servers, or you can transfer your domain over for $10.95 and get 1 year added on to your domain name life. There may be something that can be done for those who are already on cPanel type of packages though as far as transfering your site goes. 2) You can set up cron jobs through Cpanel. They use PHP, but not sure about the mode. 3) The reseller plan lets you set up your own plans as needed. I would suggest determining the amount of space you need, then setting these up in a reseller package that is large enough to handle your current and future needs. I have a number of different clients and the reseller plan has been absolutely awesome! 4) ??? not sure. 5) CMS ??? (C Management System ???) Err ... a REAL TCH-Tech will be along shortly ... One thing you will love about TCH is service! The servers are up 99.9% ... and then some. If they are down for a few minutes, the TCH staff is usually on it within 2-3 minutes to get things fixed. Rock solid performance and service. One of the best decisions I've made in my web-hosting/design business! Good luck to you!

I know the technology exist to encrypt e-mail transissions, but I've never used it nor looked into it. My personal opinion is to strongly discourage my clients from ever using e-mail for secure transissions. Especially credit card information. I'm curious how others feel about this and their experince. Maybe they'll change my view! I hope you find your answer to this one.

Hey TCH-Rob, Maybe you could give our friend a summary of osCommerce. I've never looked at it before, but since you've been using it I bet a synopsis of the things you really like or don't like might help her choose a good cart system. If you start, maybe others will chime in with their cart experiences. There so much out there that information overload could happen just by trying to research the thing ... but nothings better than some good experience and direction. I'll be interested in seeing what people say myself!

I'm going to sound like a sale's person by writing this ... but it's still good info. The fees for where I send my clients are: Discount rate: 2.19% Transaction fee: $0.25 Monthly Statement Fee: $9.95 Gateway Fee: $15.95 There is a minimum fee of $18/month for the discount rate. So if you didn't sell anything your monthly fees would be the $9.95 + $15.95 + $18.00 = $43.90 (check me on this). If you sold 10 items at $50 each in a month it would be $9.95 + $15.95 + $18.00 (still below minimum) + $2.50 (transaction fees) = $46.40. if you sold 100 items at $50 each in a month it would be $9.95 + $15.95 + $145 (discount rate) + $25 (transaction fees) = $195.54 There are additional fees for using Amex, Discover and E-Checks as well. But that is what you'll find just about everywhere. When I went hunting, and comparing with PayPal, I did up this spreadsheet for my clients to help them understand the fee structure that's out there. It was quit overwhelming at first. I think I got my hands around it now ... but man, it's a lot to take in. Again ... good luck!

All I can say is that you're a VERY good friend. Setting up an e-commerce site is work. This is what my business is, but there are many different cart systems availabe too. But I've never used any of them or know how they work with merchant accounts. One thing I think I can offer you is a reasonble credit card processing, especially for set-up, of a merchant account. I refer my clients there and, for people with reasonable credit, things have gone smoothly. Check out my site and the link in the upper-left (credit card animiation). The people I use offer free set-up and a 2.19% discount rate (internet transactions). There are other fees involved, but they are all pretty much the same as other processors or less. The discount rate and set-up fees vary pretty wildly. One thing you might consider is the store up-keep. Do you want a store where you make changes or your client? I ask this because this is where my store products are designed to work best, with those who don't have any special web design skills. All the customer needs to do is plug in their business information and product information to set up their store. Some carts that are out there might also be as client friendly ... but others will have better input for this. For on-line stores I believe it is at least smart, if not required, to calculate state tax. So for every sale that occurs INSIDE the same state as the merchant, a sales tax rate is charged according to the state that the store merchant lives. The exception is if your store owner also have a presence in other states, then it gets more tricky. Beyond carts, you can design the store yourself ... but that will be months of work ... Not sure if there's anything else I can answer for you. But I'll keep watching the thread. Good luck!

Just to end any further confusion over formats, I brought up my raw access log. The positions (length) of the IP address does vary slightly which impacts the position of where the date lands. This means that the second option in Excel is what will work. Because the position changes, using the file parse technique will clip pieces of data. I didn't see anything that the fields were delimited by. Let me know if you need help with this.

In Excel you can parse in a couple of different ways. If you are dealing with a "fixed width" line, where every line holds the same exact format in the same exact positions (i.e. IP address always starting at position X) then Excel will lead you through a Wizard of what columns to split the file up on. However, it may not be that the log file is set up this way (I haven't looked recently). In this case I use a couple of Excel formulas that figure out where to get the data from. It's easy to do if I have the data in front of me. If you want to send me a small subset of your file, like 5 records, I could do it up for you and you could use it for the rest of your entries. Let me know if I can help!

The demo is at least slow ... your link had issues with me too. My cPanel however is right there. Interesting ...

If frames load sometimes and not others, it could be either. Most likely it's a browser thing. I've had IE do funny things with frames. For sure, TCH is rock solid. If your page is coded correctly it will serve up your pages, frames, images ... anything you want! However, TCH can't control browser problems and coding issues with your pages, although the people here will try to help you with that too! Come on in! The web-water is just fine. I'm just a customer by the way!

No sound, but still happy! Yes, I looking into the "harddrake" configuration and it just doesn't list ANY sound devices even though I technically have 2 installed. One is a very generic board that probably doesn't register. Just for comparison, the linux-on-a-disk CD that installs Knoppix still likes my soundcard just fine. I rebooted with the CD just to be sure that it works and it does. bizar Next tasks on my plate (putting sound asside): .htaccess files (never had to bother with them before) .shtml files (currently not being processed) Bit by bit ... byte bu byte ... it's coming together. I LOVE the fact that Linux recognized my Win partitions! I'll have to go back eventually to get old mail. But it's kept me from using windows for 3 days! AND I just noticed that it does spell checking for me AUTOMATICALLY in this window that I'm typing in ... pretty cool!

Well things do progress! I figured out the Mysql issue. In using the RPM with Mandrake, there was another MySQL package that needed to be installed. Instantly I was able to get into MySQL as expected. Feeling confident (overly at that) I had a thought: Wouldn't it be nice to get the "phpMyAdmin" thing working like we have here at TCH. A nice GUI interface to use with MySQL. 1) Downloaded using gFTP 2) Unzipped it via command line tar. 3) Set up parameters in the config file 4) Set password in MySQL 5) Brought it up! Woohoo! Thumbs Up Thumbs Up Thumbs Up It worked almost perfectly. Ok, I struggled with where to set the password for MySQL ... but only for a few minutes. I still don't have sound let. I explored everthing I could on the Mandrake side just to be sure something wasn't missing. It's not. I'll work on that after I play around with phpMySQL. Now ... to get a multi-user environment working!!!! I'm having fun if you havn't picked that up!

I think hotlinking actually does a check to see if the "image" requested is actually being requested from a page that exists on the server. There might be a password untility program out there, but seeing that this information is usually sensitive, I'd be hard pressed on using anything I wasn't sure was secure. IMO of course.

I think I'm hooked ... I haven't added a new book to my library in a while. Sounds like a worth addition. Can anyone say business expense!!!!

Tell me more about the book ... How big? Publisher? Sounds like a good recommendation.

Hi Raul, Again the help I have received is just invaluable!!!! I'm so appreciative words cannot describe. Yes, the satisfaction of getting things working is there. For me, I really think this is an important learning step. But here's the real thing, having the support from you and others has made it feel like I'm not doing it alone. For something this drastic (from my fiew) feeling like you have support gives you that extra boost in confidence to do somethingthing that you might not feel comfortable with on your own. I know I'm babbling a little ... but I don't want you, or anyone else who has helped, to think that I am not appreciative. Because I am deeply grateful! Ok ... more details ... I've used MySQL on my Win PC as a command prompt. I just would go to DOS and type MySQL and there I am! From there I would issue any SQL command, but mostly just to create databases. I figured it had to work the same. I went to the shell as a user, typed MySQL, and then got the error I reported. I tried the shell as a root user. Same issue. I terminated KDE, logged out as a user, logged in as a root, tried again ... same error. I haven't had the time to look into this particular error in any detail yet. I'm working towads that. Got to keep things going while I figure things out at the same time. 20 hour days!!!! But it will pay off. Again, thank you so much. I'll look into the web server side and control panel access. I'm still getting familiar with this. Talk with you later! Thumbs Up

I've always received this error with my cert through cPanel. I think it's because of the way the address is. It doesn't affect my visitors, I just get these messages when I use it through cPanel. Just keep clicking "Yes" and "Continue" ... the browsers just balking at the info. The SSL will still work.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to getting me this far! How far you ask, we'll I'll just tell you! I'm up and running on Mandrake Community 10.0! My 6GB HD was plenty to get me going. I haven't been on the Windows side in a couple of days, but I haven't gotten a lot of sleep either trying to figure things out. What's working? Monitor (had an initial issue where I was stuck without GUI for a little while ... scary for a newbie!) Keyboard, mouse Internet access (browser - Mozilla, gFTP, IM - Kopete (Gaim can't access Yahoo for me), mail - Evolution) Lots of other desktop-type software loaded. I can see a start page at my "localhost". I am still working through some issues though. No sound - I have an older Creative Soundblaster AWE64 that the system didn't recognize No printer - I might be completely out of luck for my Lexmark X6170. I do have an older Lexmark 3200 still here and I saw a driver for that in my travels MySQL wont come up: ERROR 2002: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) Trying to figure out where pages need to be loaded for the server to bring them up too. I think there's a whole server administration part that I'm going to need to get dirty on. Over all I am very pleased with what I have available to me in such a short amount of time. The amount of software available is truly awesome. I even had an applicaton crash on me (it could be partially my fault) The system didn't blink. I still have access to my Windows partitions too ... so I can copy data/web files over at will. If there are any hints fo get me through some of these issues, let me know. Even direction (instead of answers) is a cool thing. I'm in this for the long run and the ability to know where to find the answers I need is better than getting a handout. Thaks again, especially Raul, for getting me this far! woooot

Forgive me if I'm missing some of the pieces to help with PHP ... because I AM missing some of the pieces. I'm a Perl guy! Thumbs Up

If it were me, I would parse out the IP address in a spreadsheet program and then use the spreadsheet program to sort by the IP address.

Hi, I've hadled all of what you have put down, but using custom scripts as the applicatoin is different for everyone. The "hotlink" protection can be accomplished by utilizing the protection under Cpanel. So there are really no scripts needed for this. The password "attack" ... I'll assume you mean people trying to guess, over and over again, someone's password. This is really part of an entire package that goes along with a database managed ID and password architecture. Again, what I have is custom for my needs and not documented all together that well. To prevent hacking of this sort, you can flag the IP address after 3-5 tries and shut down access for 15 minutes to hours for that particular ID. For tracking, I created a custom script that I could pass a message to and a user ID when users go to certain pages. The script then logs the IP address, time stamp, the message (what they were doing) and other info. I'm not sure if I'm really helping by posting this. Maybe someone out there has a script that does what you want. If you get stuck we can talk more via PM or IM. Let me know.

Hi Raul, Not trying to get in a huge debate over this, but if you have DATE, TIME or DATETIME fields in MySQL, it's all the same. It doesn't matter HOW the data gets populated into these fields, once the data is there it is formatted in a way that MySQL is used to seing things. So if you have a DB field of type DATE, it doesn't matter what you initially used to put the data there, the system date from PHP or using the NOW command from MySQL, they will both come back the same. I am curious, because I am working with this right now in a system of mine, is there ever a time where the NOW() and the date accessed by PHP and Perl would be different? I would think that they both are looking at the same clock, but I'm not sure. And if I'm missing something on the above comments, forgive me! I'm partly biased towards doing the time-stamp "my way" because I found the alternative such a pain! Not only do you have to get the time, but format it the right way. And if you mess up, you end up missing the hours, or minutes, or messing up your date. Using the NOW function was, for me, a huge time saver. Again IMO ... Love to learn from everyone on things like this. Let me know what you find out deecos!

Our Head Guru might be more comfortable working there ... because they seem to have LOTS OF ROBOTS ANSWERING THEIR HELP TICKETS! Since our HG is a robot, I thought he fit right in! But his responses are much more personal. Maybe he's got that new Linux 2.6 kernel running ...

Maybe I'm missing something, but I use the NOW() function for system dates and times. If you find that the system is off by hours, dates or minutes, you can adjust it with the INTERVAL command. $insertSQL = sprintf("INSERT INTO SUBSCRIBER_T (FULL_NAME, EMAIL_ADDR, CREATE_DT) VALUES ($thename,$theaddr,NOW())" Is this what you are looking for?

I think I would open a ticket on this one my friend. I'm just a customer, but that's my opinion. Hope it works out for you!