Regular Labs Library plugin is outdated.
Stefan Helander

Fixing “Regular Labs Library plugin is outdated. Try to re-install Modals. Modals cannot function.”

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After an update I had the error message saying:

Error

Regular Labs Library plugin is outdated. Try to re-install Modals. Modals cannot function.
Regular Labs Library plugin is not enabled. Modals cannot function.
Regular Labs Library plugin is not enabled. Articles Anywhere cannot function.

In my case, the extension causing this was cause by Articles Anywhere.

Solution:

  • Go to https://www.regularlabs.com/extensions and download the latest version of Articles Anywhere (or the extension causing trouble in your case)
  • Go to Extensions -> Manage and search for “regular”
  • Select all the regular labs extensions and uninstall them (you made a backup of the site first, right?)
  • Go to Extensions -> Install and install the extension in your Joomla site again
  • In case of the above not solving the problem, use FTP or similar to delete the following folders and try the above again:
    /plugins/system/regularlabs
    /libraries/regularlabs
Stefan Helander

FreeNAS, VMware and iSCSI with MTU 9000

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In order to improve perfomance there are recommendations to set the MTU for the iSCSI interface to MTU 9000 instead of the default 1500.

To do this, it important that you set MTU to 9000 on all devices involved; FreeNAS network interface, VMware NICs and vSwitch and all switch ports on the switches connecting those.

Note: When changing these settings, it will cause loss of connectivity so it might be a good idea not to do it on systems in production.

At one point I had forgotten to set the MTU to 9000 for the VMware NIC (only for the vSwitch) causing connectivity problems and error messages in the FreeNAS logs looking like this:

WARNING: 172.16.1.200 (iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:host-585e8872): no ping reply (NOP-Out) after 5 seconds; dropping connection

FreeNAS settings

  • In Network interface setup, add “mtu 9000” to options.

VMware settings

  • Networking -> VMkernel NICs -> edit -> set MTU to 9000 -> Save
  • Networking -> Virtual switches -> edit -> set MTU to 9000 -> Save

Network switch ports

  • Make sure all network switch ports all the way between the FreeNAS and VMware host have MTU set to 9000

Testing

On the VMware host, enable SSH and login using SSH. Use the command:

vmkping -s 8972 172.16.1.100 -d

Replace 172.17.1.100 above with the IP-address of your FreeNAS. -s 8972 sets packet size to 8972 bytes allowing 28 bytes for headers and -d means fragmentation should not be allowed.

If everyting works you will get echo replies. If you get the error message “Message too long” it means somewhere on the way between your VMware host and the FreeNAS there is a limit not allowing MTU 9000.

Stefan Helander

Akeeba restore error – 1118 – Row size too large (>8126) [solution]

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When restoring an Akeeba backup of a WordPress site the restore process was interrupted with the error message saying 1118 – Row size too large (>8126).

Solution:

  • Use SSH to log in to your database server
  • Edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf or if you use a config file under /etc/mysql/conf.d, edit that one
  • Under the [mysqld] section add:
    internal_tmp_disk_storage_engine=MyISAM
    innodb_strict_mode = 0
  • Restart mysql:
    service mysql restart

Edit: After you successfully restored the site, remove the lines and restart MySQL. I didn’t do this and later tried to move another site from this server to another using Akeeba. When the site was installed on the new server, I just got an error message saying “Error Establishing a Database Connection”. To resolve it, I had to go back to the above server, remove the lines from mysql config, restart MySQL, make a new backup of the site using Akeeba and successfully restore it on the new server.

Credit: The solution to this problem was found here.

Stefan Helander

Contact Form 7 not working with All-in-One Intranet plugin [solution]

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When using Contact Form 7 forms in a site where the All-in-One Intranet plugin is installed, it will not be possible to submit the CF7 forms. The solution is quite simple.

In the Advanced settings of the Contact Form 7 form, add the line:

subscribers_only: true

Stefan Helander

Latest iLO2 firmware for HP Proliant DL380 Gen 5

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When looking for the latest iLO2 firmware for HP Proliant DL380 Gen 5 on the HPE website I found version 2.27 dated in 2015. To resolve browser issues with modern browsers I wanted to find a later firmware.

On this site you will find an exellent collection of all the latest iLO firmwares: https://pingtool.org/latest-hp-ilo-firmwares/

The latest listed iLO2 firmware is 2.33 dated march 2018 (when writing this post). The download links leads to HP sites so it should be legitimate. However, when unpacking the archive and investigating the Readme-file, only Gen 6 servers where listed.

HP Proliant iLO2 firmware

HP Proliant iLO2 firmware

It turns out the firmware works fine on my DL380 Gen 5 iLO2. Upgrade had to be done through Microsoft Internet Explorer 11, otherwise when trying to upgrade through other browsers I got the error message “iLO 2 firmware update has not started.” described here. The simple solution was to upgrade through MSIE 11.

Disclaimer: I can’t garantuee this will work for you or not get you in trouble with your system using the above procedure. It is just a description of what worked for me.

 

Stefan Helander

What Supermicro motherboard model does my server have?

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When getting the latest IPMI firmware for your Supermicro server, you need to know what model of the motherboard your server has. Often the server lives in a datacenter somewhere and you don’t want to go there, take down the server, pull it out of the rack and investigate it. If you are running Linux on it, you can simply check the dmesg log for “Supermicro”.

grep Supermicro /var/log/dmesg

Supermicro motherboard model

Supermicro motherboard model

Stefan Helander

open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/) is not within the allowed path(s) in WordPress [Solved]

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After a WordPress site move to new hosting, some images wouldn’t load and investigating the php error log revealed:

open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/) is not within the allowed path(s)

The solutions was to edit the database using phpMyAdmin, go to the table wp_options and set the correct value for upload_path.

Stefan Helander

VMware ESXi 5.5 guest freezes randomly [solved]

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On a VMware 5.5 ESXi host I suddenly experienced guest machined that hanged or froze. I had to reset the guest machine to get it up and running again. In the Events tab I could see entries like below at the time of freezing.

Lost access to volume 51d15c1a-17706da4-0ae6-001f29e5c998 (datastore1) due to connectivity issues. Recovery attempt is in progress and outcome will be reported shortly.
info
2018-10-11 04:03:50
datastore1

Device mpx.vmhba1:C0:T0:L0 performance has deteriorated. I/O latency increased from average value of 69864 microseconds to 4383213 microseconds.
warning
2018-10-11 04:03:50
localhost

I started to check my disks and raid as I suspected a failing disk, but the disks and raid was in working order.

It turned out that the problem started around the time I did a guest snapshot. The datastore had about 14 GB free space out of it’s 924 GB capacity and this seems to be to0 little. After deleting a couple of snapshots the problem disappeared.

When the snapshots had been deleted, I also had to consolidate some of the virtual machines disks.

Edit: A couple of weeks later one of the disks in the raid actually failed without any warning that it was about to fail. After replacing the disk the problems were less frequent but sometimes still occured, and I discovered it was during backups, i.e. with a lot of traffic on the disks.

Moving away one of the most busy clients to another VMware host, the problems disappeared. The disks were SATA disks because this was not really a production system but more of a test and development environment where speed was not so critical. The cause was probably just overloading the disks with more requests than they could handle in combination with a disk about to fail.

Stefan Helander

APS package installation_task stuck in ISPConfig3

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When trying to install an APS package on a ISPConfig3 system, the package was never installed and the status “installation_task” remained for the site I tried to install a package.

Investigating /var/log/ispconfig/cron.log revealed:

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in /usr/local/ispconfig/server/lib/classes/aps_installer.inc.php:627

This problem can occur when curl is not installed on the target server, but that was not the problem in this case.

The server had been upgraded to Ubuntu 16.05 which runs PHP 7.0 instead of PHP 5. Curl was installed but the problem was that php7.0-curl was missing. The problem was resolved by:

sudo apt-get install php7.0-curl

The next issue that occured according to the logs was:

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class 'ZipArchive' not found in /usr/local/ispconfig/server/lib/classes/aps_installer.inc.php:106

This problem was resolved by:

sudo apt-get install php7.0-zip

After this nothing more had to be done. The ISPConfig cron now successfully installed the APS package automatically.

Stefan Helander

iPhone, iPad or Mac computers unable to connect to wifi network

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The Apple products, iPhone, iPad and Mac computers sometimes has problems when connecting to a wifi network where other devices have no problems. The problem seems to be in the encryption used.

Make sure the router doesn’t have WPA/WPA2 mixed mode enabled, i.e. set it to WPA2 only. If encryption is configurable, use AES (not TKIP or TKIP/AES).

You can also read more about Apple recommendet wifi router settings here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202068