adoute

I'm looking for a bulletin board (forum) script for my son's Hockey Team's site. I'm looking for something as simple as Bravenet's forum service (example). I have installed the phpBB script through cpanel, however, it seems a little over the kids heads - they are all 8 or 9, and while they can use the simple forum style of the bravenet forum, the phpBB offers (and seems to require) too many options for them to completely understand. So, if anyone can offer any suggestions, it would be greatly appreciated! Thanks - Allan Doute

I'm having an issue trying to have cpanel do a complete backup of my site, and send the file to my home ftp server. This used to work in the past, but now all I get is a very small (either 0k, 4k, or 8k) file. I also get the 'Backup Completed' email. My FTP server at home doesn't seem to be the problem - I can upload a file that is roughly the same size that I expect the backup to be, using the same logon credentials that I tell cpanel to use. In the ftp server logs, everytrhing looks fine - except I'm not sure about the ALLO line... The response code it gives basically says the server is ignoring it, though. Here is the log entry from my server: server20.totalchoicehosting.com UNKNOWN nobody [03/May/2004:07:07:47 -0400] "USER ******" 331 - server20.totalchoicehosting.com UNKNOWN ****** [03/May/2004:07:07:47 -0400] "PASS (hidden)" 230 - server20.totalchoicehosting.com UNKNOWN ****** [03/May/2004:07:07:47 -0400] "TYPE I" 200 - server20.totalchoicehosting.com UNKNOWN ****** [03/May/2004:07:07:47 -0400] "ALLO 8192" 202 - server20.totalchoicehosting.com UNKNOWN ****** [03/May/2004:07:07:47 -0400] "PASV" 227 - server20.totalchoicehosting.com UNKNOWN ****** [03/May/2004:07:07:47 -0400] "STOR backup-5.3.2004_07-05-46_doutene.tar.gz" 226 8192 server20.totalchoicehosting.com UNKNOWN ****** [03/May/2004:07:07:47 -0400] "QUIT" 221 This is my latest attempt - and resulted in an 8k file, which appears to be an invalid tar ball. Can anyone offer any insight into what may be going wrong? If it would be more approprioate for me to open a help ticket, than I will do so. Thanks - Allan Doute

TCH-Mike - Thanks. I'll let you know if it gives me any trouble. Allan

TCH-Mike: OK. I've looked through Dada Mail's documentation, and I'm not quite sure what configuration settings I'll need to make to avoid the 50 mails / 300 second limit. If I install it, would you possibly be able to assist me with configuration? Allan

Is mailman (the mail list software available in C-panel) configured to only send 500 in 5 minutes? If so, that might be the easiest way for me to go. If I used PHP's sleep() function, wouldn't the browser have to stay open until the script finished processing? If mailman is the right way to do this, then thats what I'll do. Is that the concensus - that a mailing list is the best way to handle this? Thanks - Allan

I have used PHP's mail() function in a few scripts before, for sending simple mail to one or two addresses. I have a database of approx. 6000 addresses that I would like to send a personal note to, a few (maybe 4 or 5) times a year. These are personal notes (I know, it's a lot of addresses). I have written a PHP script that will run through my database of addresses, and send an e-mail to each one individually, using the mail() function. I am wondering a couple things: - Will this cause severe server load, thus degrading other users sites? - Is this against the "Terms of Service"? (This is a PEROSNAL list, not for profit or spam) I realize that using a canned "Mail List" software package may be preferable, but figured that writing a quick PHP script would be easier, considering the mailing will only happen a few times a year. I have tested my script with a small list of addresses (works fine), but was hoping to get some "Official TCH" input before I ran it against my big db of addresses. So, TCH staff, what do you think? Thank you for your input - Allan Doute (Hopefully, this forum is the appropriate place for this post. If not, my apologies.)

I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed these posts. I use both Linux and Windows quite a bit. I use Mandrake (8.2 as a server and 9.0 as a regular, everyday OS) and Windows 2000. My work machine runs Mandrake 9.0 and Windows 2000 in a virtual machine (VMWare). I can definitely understand Borfast's comment about Mandrake putting some things in non-standard locations, but I have been using Mandrake since 7.1 - I'm very used to and comfortable with it. I tried RedHat for a little while, but I've become so used to Mandrake & its quirks that Redhat seemed almost foreign... There are several Linux distributions which boot & run from a CD. This is really convenient - you can "look & play around" in Linux without doing anything to your Windows installation other than re-booting. Knoppix seems to be a good place to start. If you do decide to try Linux, I think you'll be happily surprised - if you give it some time, and are willing to learn. If it weren't for a few work related, custom written apps, I'd ditch Windows for my work related PC use in a heartbeat. At home, I use Linux, but the kids need a windows PC - for games. Not that there aren't a lot of great games for Linux, just not as many as for Windows. Plus, my son uses Windows at school - no use confusing a 7 year old. Give him a couple more years, and I'll have another Linux convert on my hands. By no means am I a Linux expert, but I'm always willing to answer any questions that I can. Any reason to move away from M$ is a good reason in my mind. Allan

I just wanted to commend the staff at TCH. Within 8 hours, they had found & fixed my e-mail issue (somehow some file permissions got messed up, and I couldn't receive any e-mail - honestly, I'm pretty sure I didn't do it!). Incredible service. TCH really does rock. I started this topic before deciding a help ticket was a more appropriate arena for the problem, and fully understand the importance of only reporting a problem via one method. So again, my apologies for this fairly useless topic, and also again, I'd like to commend TCH's staff. Rock Sign Allan Doute

Sorry for starting this topic - I sent a help ticket instead. I couldn't find a way to deltet this topic once I started it. Again, my apologies - Allan Doute

Thanks for taking a look. I'll take a look at the pages you reccomended for reading, and won't hesitate to ask if I have any questions. Thanks again for your time! Allan

www.doute.net doute.net (just a family site - not commercial at all) doute.net is a simple family site. There are lots of pictures & videos of my kids, as well as some basic info on what is going on in our lives. There is a link to TCH near the bottom of the index page per the TCH linking guidelines, and there are a couple more elsewhere in the site. I'm interested in your thoughts on how well any search engine may index my site. It's not critical to me that it is visible on search engines as it is a family site - and the people I want to visit already know how to get to it, but it would be nice to see if anyone else cares to visit my site. So, if you have any time to 'spare', please let me know what you think. Thank you for your time - Allan Doute

If the get-together happens, and it's in Michigan, I'd be more than happy to help out in any way I can. I'd really like to put some faces with the names of all the friendly people I've met here. A "tour" of TCH's facilities does sound rather intriguing, too. Wherever it ends up being, if its in or near lower Michigan, I'd love to attend - and again, I'd also like to help out any way I can. Allan

Sounds great to me. Where in Michigan is TCH? I'm in Plymouth. A get together sounds like it would be a lot of fun. Allan

I'm in the process of doing just that. The only downside to that is the fact that my (and my wife's) cell phones can only accept 160 characters, and the FROM address is part of that. So, even using "x@doute.net" takes 11 characters away from the message. I'll try it out as soon as I push the code to TCH, but its been working fine today so far - no delays. It really is intermittent - seems to only delay important messages. But, it just seems so strange that the messages get delayed SOMETIMES no matter where they are going (except to TCH servers, of course). And, yes, it's probably a Cingular issue, so there may well be nothing I can do about it. And that truth does kind of hurt . I'll let you know if I notice any delays or lost messages after I change the FROM address to a valid address. Thanks again for your time - Allan

That's basically what I figured, but I don't like that answer . The only part about that answer that bothers me technically is the fact that the message sometimes is hours late or not delivered at all to whatever address I send it to. My work address VERY rarely has any delay problems, and (believe it or not), my ComCast address has always been very reliable, too. Is it possible that the FROM address being a non-existing address may be posing a problem? I find that hard to believe - becuase the problem is so intermittent, but at this point I'm grasping at anything. Allan

Sorry for the long delay - here is the source code... ($body, $from, and $subject are set earlier in the script) I had forgotten that the message and the backup were not sent together (as to: and as .cc) as I had stated, but were sent as seperate messages. I don't remember why I changed to seperate messages, but I don't think that would explain the lag.. Any ideas? Thanks - Allan

I've changed the script to send it to my ComCast e-mail address, and my work address instead of the cell phone. Both ComCast and Work have experienced the delay, however the work address has not lost a message (I've tried both at least 5 times). I have not set the script up to send to both ComCast AND cell phone (still with a .cc to TCH). I'll try that, and will post the source code as soon as I get to it (should be about 1/2 hour from now). Thanks - Allan

One of the pages on my site is set up to send short messages to mine & my wife's cell phones. I uses php's mail function to handle this. I set the page up becuase our cell provider's (cingular) system for sending messages is a bit flaky and unreliable. Unfortuneatley, so is my solution... My problem is that when a message is sent by php's mail function, it can sometimes take hours to reach the recipient (in this case, a cell phone). I have my script set up to mail the message to the cell phone's e-mail address, and to also .cc my TCH hosted address. The .cc always arrives instantly, and most of the time, the cell phone message arrives within a minute or 2. Sometimes, the cell phone message arrives a few hours later, and sometimes not at all. I have tried setting the script up to send the message to my comcast e-mail address (still .cc'ing my TCH address), and had the same thing happen, so I can assume that it's not cingular's fault. Again, the .cc always arrives immediately, but the real message sometimes takes hours to arrive, sometimes arrives quickly, and sometimes never arrives. Does anybody have any idea why this may be happening? I'm not at a PC that has the source of my script on it right now - I'll post the php code as soon as I can, in case that may help. Thank you! Allan

That sounds great! A couple weeks ago, my nephew TRASHED my sons Playstation 2... He knocked it off the entertainment center, then actually stomped on it a few times. Unbelievable. His parents don't want to contributre to its replacement at all... I can't wait to hear what the contest is going to be... Allan

Migrating data from Access to MySQL is fairly simple. I have exported several db's from Access as CSV data, then used PHPMyAdmin (accessible from cpanel) to import the data to a MySQL db. Is the database populated with static data, or will the person managing the data be making changes on a regular basis? You could write a custom PHP interface for data modification & entry, but it wouldn't be the same as using Access. On machines at work (not TCH servers) I have migrated several db's from Access to MySQL, and then written web interfaces in PHP for them. If you end up going that route, I'm willing to help any way I can. I'm certainly not an expert in PHP or MySQL, but I have a good working knowledge of both. Good Luck - Allan Doute www.doute.net

I guess that will answer it, so I guess its every month at the beginning of the month Jim That will get me close, but I'm wondering if the logs are rolled just after midnight on the 1st, or sometime late at night on the last day of the month... Allan

Thanks, Rick. Now I just need to find out how often & when the logs are rotated. I can set up a cron job on a linux box at home to retrieve the log file if I need to, but it would be nicer to set up a cron job that runs on the same server as the log rotater so I can grab the log and copy it right before it gets rotated out of existence... Allan

I have a few questions about the server logs available via cpanel... - How often are logs rotated? Is it always at approximately the same time? - Is my logfile available via FTP? If so, what is the path to the file? - can I set up a cron job to copy the logfile to a directory in my file area for later download? Essentially, I'd like to be able to get my logfiles just prior to rotation. It's not critical that I get the files immediately before they get overwritten, but I'd like to get as much of the info that they contain as possible. Thanks for your time - Allan Doute

When are the access logs deleted? I would like to be able to schedule a cron job on a linux box at home to download my access logs once a month, ideally just before they are deleted. It is not critical that I get the log immediately before it is deleted, but as close to that time as possible would be nice. Considering that, is it possible to get the raw access log file via ftp? If so, what is the path to the logfiles & when are they deleted for the new month? Thanks - Allan Doute

Believe it or not, Comcast's DNS started working Sunday evening. Again, I would really like to thank all of those who responded so quickly - wether you were offering a solution (wait a while longer) or letting me know that my site was visible. I really feel like I stumbled across a wonderful community. Now, I just need to find the time to get the videos migrated to TCH's server & get the pictures of the championship game posted... Thanks again - Allan Doute http://www.doute.net TCH Rocks