In this howto i will describe how to update PHP rpms on servers to latest version. If you have server running CentOS/Fedora/RHEL, you will noticed that it will use regular rpms of distro to install PHP and to update you have to restrict yourself with distro update of said rpms of PHP, which can be not a major update. Read the rest of this entry…

Today i face an issue, which is quite old and i experienced a lot with it and i usually doing reboot to fix it but you cannot reboot your production server. The issue founds on RHEL, Fedora and CentOS system that whenever you run any rpm command i.e trying to install any software or query rpm database, it just stuck after enter and wont do anything.

After diagnosing it, I found up2date is running on my server, so first thing just clear that if something related to rpm is running including yum or up2date, it will lock some files to do any other rpm transaction.

I use kill command to kill the process of up2date but still the problem was same, rpm got stuck / hang and wont do anything further.

Then i issued lsof command to find which files were locked and in used by any old or dead process related to rpm

lsof | grep /var/lib/rpm/

I found /var/lib/rpm/__db* are locked by some process maybe up2date, so i need to delete them to release rpm database for further transaction.

rm -rf /var/lib/rpm/__db*

and it works, all the installation/query of rpm working absolutely fine. I hope this will help.

I encountered an error while installing Solaris 10 under my KVM running on Fedora 12. I get following error after booting Solaris 10 and select Solaris for booting to start installation

panic[cpu0]/thread=xxxxxxxx: page_unlock: page xxxxxxx is not locked

After searching i found that minimal required RAM for installation of Solaris 10 is 768MB and i was using 512MB. So i increase the RAM under my KVM configuration and bingo the installation starts smoothly.

In this howto i will describe how to import large mysql dump files without PHPMyAdmin and Shell Access. I am writing this howto because my hosting company (well most of them) wont allow to import very large files using MySQL dump files. Like Godaddy.com limit you to import only 2MB file using PHPMyAdmin. This also goes to large mysql dump files which has extremely high queries like i have more than 146000 records in one table. Read the rest of this entry…

In this howto i will describe how to install subversion with TRAC. Subversion is an open source version control system alternative to CVS and TRAC an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects which provides an interface to Subversion. I install it on CentOS 5.4 which is already running as Web Server. I will use sohailriaz.com source to be maintain by Subversion and TRAC to track all development. Read the rest of this entry…

Today tip is how to retrieve PLESK admin password. The PLESK admin password is stored in /etc/psa/.psa.shadow file and you can see it by issuing following command.

cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow

In PLESK root user is to manage server and admin user is to manage PLESK Control Panel with database (be remember there is no root for database in PLESK, use admin).

In this how to i will describe how to install memcached on your server with PHP Extension.  memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. My server is running CentOS 5.3 with CPanel. Read the rest of this entry…

In this how to i will describe how to install RED5 server on Centos 5.3. This how to can be used to install RED5 server on Centos 4 and Fedora 8 – 11 as well. RED5 is open source flash server written in java supports streaming audio/video, recording client streams, shared objects, live stream publishing etc. Read the rest of this entry…

In this howto i will describe how to install /configure full feature firewall on your server using Config Server Firewall (CSF)  script from http://www.configserver.com. Firewall are the basic need of every server now a days and people trying to protect there server by using different scripts but CSF gives all in one solution. The tools available for the implementing are either over-complex, not user friendly, or simply aren’t as effective as they could be. So that is the reason CSF developed. Read the rest of this entry…

This is a small script which we used to setup on our large cluster of webservers to see loadavg on terminal or putty title. This was very useful as you dont have to run top or w command to see what’s the current loadavg. It automatically updated the loadavg value every 2 seconds (it can be increased or decreased) on title of terminal or putty screen. Additionally it shows hostname and current time & date with loadavg. Read the rest of this entry…