Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: htaccess

  • Strange Outage

    We’re back up after a very strange outage. The 500 internal server error was because our .htaccess file was sideways.

    What I mean by sideways is that part of a line had been truncated which led to an incorrect htaccess rule and all sorts of error pages thrown up.

    Interestingly the only thing happening prior to the first errors was a page edit here in WordPress. I updated my dd-wrt page last night right before the errors started getting tossed up. Is it possible that wordpress 2.6.3 stomped on my htaccess??? Don’t know, but we’re back up now.

  • WordPress Fancy Permalinks not working Giving 404 error

    I spent the better part of a Friday night sorting this out. I had just launched 4 new wordpress blogs that were secondary installs on each server. (I use a VPS and /home/domain/www/ was the primary wordpress install – the secondary installs existed at /home/domain/www/secondsite ) . The problem was that I switched on the fancy permalinks in the control panel of wordpress and after that nothing worked but the main page. Setting things back to the default I could see posts, but not the feed or anything else that relied on mod_rewrite.

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  • Experiencing some turbulence

    I knew for some time that a server upgrade at my hosting provider was coming – they were essentially upgrading the underlaying software. (New versions of apache/php/etc. the entire system.) The original time was postponed and I breathed a little sigh of relief because I host somewhere in the order of 7 domains here. Well, this morning it happened and things mostly worked, some of the lesser importance domains were affected although. It took some .htaccess editing and php.ini editing to get everything working. (somehow php.ini had a bit of text that had “word wrapped” and was causing problems.) Also, .htaccess rules were causing the server to offer .html files for download instead of displaying them. All seems to be in order now. Back to regular schedule.

  • Web translation

    I found this link of plugins for wordpress to aid in multilingual site building. I’ve been experimenting with English/Spanish designs of one site I maintain using plain html (index.html.en index.html.es and the server gives the correct page depending on the browser localization. It seems as though there was an .htaccess change that I had to make as well although I don’t recall off the top of my head. (Maybe I can update if I read through it again.)

  • Virtual Server on Apache to listen on an alternate port

    In the last few days, I had to set up something a bit unusual with apache. Basically the goal was to have apache listen for connections on two different ports (the standard port 80 and an alternate port 85). The problem was that I wanted different content at each port. Port 85 was to be an .htaccess redirect for another domain (with some port forwarding magic at the firewall.) Port 80 was to remain an internal intranet page. So…. this was all done with vhosts (virtual hosts.)

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  • Saving you from yourself or specifying which index file to use with apache

    As I said, I mistakenly uploaded a page of links that I use for the main administration across many sites to this domain. Unfortunately, the server preferred using the index.html to the index.php that serves up the USUAL home page. So, for about an hour after my slipup…. the main page for this site showed a page full of links to admin logins/stat monitors, google utilities, etc. etc. (At least I’m not dumb enough to have put in password information.) Anyway…. I thought, how should I protect myself from doing that again? .htaccess is the answer….

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  • Using .htaccess to ALLOW directory browsing

    By default the apache install for most sites now restricts directory browsing. It’s a good idea, you don’t want just ANYTHING to be browsable on a web server, but there comes a time that it makes life easier for a directory (or tree of directories) to be browsable without having to write (copy and paste) links to a bunch of files. Fortunately, .htaccess files can be used for many things and this, of course, is one of them…

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  • WordPress trackback problem FINALLY SOLVED….

    For around 3-4 months now I’ve had a REALLY annoying problem with the wordpress install on this site. Trackbacks suddenly stopped working. Somewhere around my 800th post or so while the WMF vulnerability was circulating (between Christmas and New Years) and I was typing furiously – poof…. suddenly trackbacks stopped going out. (Incoming trackbacks seemed to work just fine…) What’s had me stumped for so long is that I host 2 (now three) other sites off the same domain and I haven’t had a problem with ANY of those sending pingbacks or trackbacks.

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  • Google indexing weirdness

    In looking at my Google Analytics info…. I checked on the Northcarolinagenealogy.net site’s stats and found that it’s really dropped since about Friday or Saturday from decent traffic to next to nothing. (20 visitors a day now.) The first thing I noticed was no google.com referrers…. So, I started looking and sure enough the last Google search visitor arrived Friday. So, I started investigating further site:northcarolinagenealogy.net brought up nothing (as did site:www.northcarolinagenealogy.net).

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  • Having multiple domains direct to one web site

    Recently I’ve consolidated a few domain names that I’ve acquired to direct to this site, and a few others to direct to another site that I maintain. One of the things that I wondered about after I set things up in the sites control panel to receive requests as the other domain names was how that might effect search engine positioning. (more…)