Whew… long title no?  I’ve spent the past few days trying to get my WordPress app to work on my iPhone.  I kept getting “Http 1.1/404″ errors.  I knew the login was right and tried countless variations of this site’s WordPress URL, xmlrpc.php location, etc.  What finally did it was installing the free ConfigServer ModSecurity Control, or CMC for short.  After installing, your cPanel WHM should show a link to the plugin on the bottom left of the screen.

Once CMC pulls up, you will notice a big text box labeled “mod_security rule ID list”.  XMLRPC has an ID of 90001, which you need to  type in the box, save the global whitelist, and boom… you are done.

This magical plugin works with anything that mod_security is blocking.  If something isn’t working right on your site, you can check the mod_security logs in WHM by going to “plugins -> mod security”.  Everything in the log has an “ID” and that’s what you’ll need to tell CMC to unblock.  You can also disable mod_security for an entire domain all together, but this is highly not recommended!

This is a quick post that will hopefully help someone else out there.  I just bought an inexpensive (very inexpensive) 40″ television from Amazon, built by TCL.  Getting it to work with my DirecTV universal remote has been an hour of life wasting headaches that I have finally resolved.  I figured this was going to be difficult, since the TCL manual says “this TV utilizes new remote control signals and may not be compatible with your existing universal remote…”  Awesome.

Anyway, I have the “standard” DirecTV universal remote, model RC34 (shown at the top left of the remote in small print).  I found that the RCA code “11547″ gets the TV to work with power on/off and volume; the only two features I needed (simple setup).  By the way, I did try the built in DirecTV receiver programming options and nothing helped.  Enjoy!

Working in the field, I use a lot of “apps” that give me access to my files remotely (Strongspace, Expandrive, Transmit, Dropbox, etc.).  Sometimes though, I have the need to copy “hidden” files (.htaccess – for example) to/from my online storage locations.  On OSX Lion, showing these types of files is off by default.

There are software packages out there that will show these files for you, but you can turn this on with a quick command-line entry in Terminal:

• Open Terminal
• Type:  defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
• Now hold ‘alt’ on the keyboard while clicking on the Finder icon.  Click “relaunch”.  Wa-La…hidden files!
• Quit Terminal

Done!  Now all hidden files will show (including on your desktop).  To turn it back off, do the following:

• Open Terminal
• Type:  defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO
• Now hold ‘alt’ on the keyboard while clicking on the Finder icon.  Click “relaunch”.  Wa-La…NO hidden files!
• Quit Terminal

It’s quick and easy, and you don’t need to install other software packages to make this work.  As far as I know, this trick works on OSX 10.7.x.

I use a Macbook Air 13″ and noticed that when I plug in my external monitor – then unplug later on – my Mission Control wallpapers are messed up.  See, I use Hot Corners to access Mission Control, to access and create new desktops, and after using my external monitor, I noticed that my Mission Control wallpaper is full screen, essentially blocking the view of the desktops I’ve created.

To fix this, I used to restart the computer – a small price to pay for getting my Mission Control back to normal.  Plus, with OSX Lion, my windows came back to life when I rebooted (mostly).  Alas, I wanted an easier way to fix my problem and I’ve found one.  Using Terminal, type in:

killall Dock

This will reset the wallpapers, except those that you have custom placed in each desktop.  No need to reboot anymore!  I’m using OSX 10.7.3 but this also worked on 10.7.x before I upgraded.  Enjoy.

One of my clients runs their own Crashplan Pro server and needed help installing their SSL cert.  I came across an error and thought I would post the fix here.  Keep in mind that I’m using GoDaddy for the SSL but the error we’ll get is related to the Java Development Kit (JDK) install on the server.

First, Crashplan’s SSL setup tutorial lists the commands to generate a key and your CSR.  Let’s generate the key first:

• keytool -genkey -keystore keys.jks -alias tomcat -keypass tomcat -keysize 2048 -keyalg RSA -storepass tomcat

I have changed the key size to be 2048 – GoDaddy requires this.  Crashplan’s command originally sets the key size to be 1024.  Next, generate your CSR:

• keytool -certreq -v -keystore keys.jks -alias tomcat -keypass tomcat -file test.csr -storepass tomcat

Send that CSR to your CA (GoDaddy, etc.) to generate and download your cert.  Next, the error.  Crashplan says to install the cert:

• keytool -import -keystore keys.jks -alias tomcat -file your.domain.com.crt -trustcacerts -storepass tomcat -keypass tomcat

…and we get this: “Error: java.lang.exception: failed to establish chain from reply”

In a perfect world, the “-trustcacerts” should have overridden the security check and installed the cert.  Alas, it did not.  I did verify that GoDaddy was listed in my /cacerts for JKE but it still didn’t install the cert correctly.  To fix this, you need to install the intermediate cert that you should have received from your CA:

• keytool -import -trustcacerts -alias root -keystore keys.jks -file gd_intermediate.crt -storepass tomcat

Keep the -alias as “root” – don’t change it to tomcat to match Crashplan’s previous instructions or it won’t work.  You should receive a message stating that your intermediate cert has bee installed successfully.  Now, go back and run the import again for your SSL:

• keytool -import -keystore keys.jks -alias tomcat -file your.domain.com.crt -trustcacerts -storepass tomcat -keypass tomcat

That should successfully install your SSL.  Once that’s done, you can continue your Crashplan SSL setup.  Good luck!

There are plenty of articles out there on how to add new storage to Linux.  This is something I don’t do that often, so I’m going to document it here for future reference – maybe it’ll help someone as well.

My Linux VM is a CentOS 5.5 64-bit machine running on ESX 4.1.  I’ve directly attached iSCSI storage to it within vSphere and now I need to have the VM actually see the storage.  To the command line!

The first thing to do is make sure Linux sees the new drives:

• fdisk -l | grep Disk

You should see something like this:

• Disk /dev/sdb:  1099.5 GB, 1099511558144 bytes

Obviously, your GB size will vary depending on the size of the drive/storage you are trying to attach.  The above example is what I see because I’ve added a 1TB data store to my VM as a directly attached drive.  That being said, the next thing we need to do is create a partition:

• fdisk /dev/sdb
• n  - create new partition
• p – primary
• 1 – tell the drive what partition number it is (in my case it was the 1st partition)
• defaults (just press “enter”) – the rest of the options, I just use the defaults because I wanted to use the whole drive for storage.  You can adjust these to your liking.
• w – write the new partition table and exit.

Now we need to format the new drive using whatever type of file system we want.  In my case, I chose ext3 so I entered the following:

• mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 – prepare to wait a while depending on the drive size.  Note here, that with the new partition, you now see /sdb1…not just /sdb.  We will be working with /sdb1 moving forward.

Once this is complete we need to create a mount point for the new drive and then actually mount the new storage.  You can create a directory anywhere you wish, but I recommend creating a folder in the /mnt/ directory for best practices:

• mkdir /mnt/something – this creates the directory where Linux will access the storage
• mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/something – note that “something” means for you to pick what you want it to say.

Once this is done, you can verify your new drives are working by using:

• df -H – this will show your mount points and drives.

The last thing to do is, we need to edit the fstab so that these drives are mounted when the system is booted:

• vi /etc/fstab – this opens, in vi (you can use any editor here – nano, etc.), the fstab for editing.  Enter the following for each drive you want mounted on boot:
  • /dev/sdb1     /mnt/something     ext3     defaults     1 2
• Save your changes and exit the editor.

That’s it!  You now have usable storage for Linux.  This is just the tip of the iceberg; you can set partitions to boot, create multiple partitions, change the file system to any number of other choices, etc.  As always, let me know if you have questions or see something wrong!  Good luck!