Joomla breadcrumbs not working, solved in JoomSEF by entering ItemID
Stefan Helander

Breadcrumbs only showing “Home” for Joomla article

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A Joomla article was published through a menu item (single article) but the breadcrumbs when displaying the article only showed “Home” (not clickable). The menu path and article title was missing in the breadcrumbs.

In this case JoomSEF was installed on the site. The solution was to find the SEF URL in JoomSEF (go to “Manage SEF URLs”). The ItemID field was empty.

The problem was solved by entering the menu ID for the menu item displaying the article in the ItemID field, saving and clearing the cache.

Stefan Helander

WordPress shows white page after site move

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WordPress just showing a white page means it is experienceing PHP errors. When it occurs after a site has been moved from one hosting to another it can be caused by several reasons.

To make it possible to track down the cause you can temporarily add the following to the .htaccess file in the root. If this gives you a internal server error 500 it means it is not allowed by the host. If allowed, you will get error messages from PHP dispayed on screen when accessing the site:

php_flag display_startup_errors on
php_flag display_errors on

There are visbible PHP ending tags ?> on the site

If you see more or less normal output from the site but once in a while you see lines ending with ?>. This can happen if the site has been running on PHP 5 where the short PHP start tag <? is allowed (instead of the longer <?php.

If the site has been moved to PHP 7 where this is not longer allowed, it can cause this kind of strange behaviour.

If you don’t want to go through all the code and find all the occurrences of <? and replace them with <?php (which is one solution), you can simply add the following to your php.ini:

short_open_tag=On

You need to restart Apache after this.

Wordfence plugin is installed

You need to manually edit the system specific paths in the following files:

  • .user.ini in the site root, change the path after auto_prepend_file
  • wordfence-waf.php in the site root, change the paths on all occurrences

WP Rocket plugin is installed

The file wp-content/advanced-cache.php contains system specific paths. You can manually update them or just simply delete the file and login to wp-admin of the site and it will be recreated automatically with the correct paths.

Stefan Helander

Call Book Log 3 installation with custom database name

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Call Book Log 3 is a log book program for radio amateurs, hosted on a web server, based on PHP 7 and MySQL/mariaDB.

The database for the software is named ‘hamcallbook‘ by default but if you are going to host it on a server where you can’t choose the name of the database, like a web hosting company (“web hotel”) it will not install.

The solution is to simply edit the file setup2.php before starting the installation process. Search for all occurrences of ‘hamcallbook‘ and replace it with your database name.

After installing, edit the file dbconnect.php, find ‘hamcallbook‘ and replace it with your database name.

pfsense IPsec phase 1 disable rekey
Stefan Helander

pfsense IPsec VPN tunnel disconnects after 8 hours

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I’ve been troubled by the annoying disconnection of the IPsec VPN tunnel on a pfsense firewall. The tunnel disconnects after about 8 hours.

The solution in my case was to enable “Disable rekey” which “Disables renegotiation when a connection is about to expire.“. The setting is found under Phase 1 advanced settings.

Disable rekey setting under Phase 1 Advanced settings
Stefan Helander

MySQL Error 1215: Cannot add foreign key constraint

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Check that both tables have the same engine type, so there isn’t a mix of for example MyISAM and InnoDB.

Stefan Helander

rm unable to delete file even as root or sudo [Solved]

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When it is not possible to delete a file using rm even when logged in as root or by using sudo, check the file attributes with:

lsattr filename.ext

If it has the “i” attribute, this is preventing the file from being deleted, even by super users. When you have verified the reason for this and still want to delete the file then remove the “i” attribute with:

chattr -i filename.ext

Then delete the file using rm as you normally would.

Stefan Helander

Ispconfig3: Let’s Encrypt not working

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There can be several reasons for Let’s Encrypt certificates not being issued for sites. These are some things to check:

  • When creating a new website, save it first, then open it again and check Let’s encrypt and then save it (i.e. don’t check the Let’s Encrypt unless the website has been saved at least once in Ispconfig3)
  • Delete any existing certificates under the SSL tab for the website, including self signed
  • Check that all host names for the website and webaliases are pointing to the correct server
  • Use A records, not CNAME
  • Make sure there are no redirects on the website
  • Check for error messages in the log file; /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
  • If you get messages in the letsencrypt.log file like;
    “Please choose an account
    Choises: “
    Then check /etc/letsencrypt/accounts/acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory and if there are more than one account (subdirectory) move all but one to another location.
  • Check the web logs for the site, both access and error logs, for accesses to .well-known/acme-challenge/* and verify that they are served properly (status code 200)
Stefan Helander

Roundcube – add client’s IP-address and host name to outgoing email headers

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By default, the logged in client’s IP-address and hostname are not present in the outgoing email headers which makes it hard to trace the origin in case of abuse.

To make roundcube add this to the email headers of outgoing email, put this in the roundcube configuration file:

// put user's ip and host name in mail headers to enable trace
$config['http_received_header'] = true;

Stefan Helander

Ispconfig3: awstats/webalizer not working, client web logs empty

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If awstats or webalizer is not containing any data and the client web logs are empty, the cause might be missing mounts of the log directories in /etc/fstab.

Search /etc/fstab for the client domain name. If no log mount is found, add a line for the client web site manually in this form:

/var/log/ispconfig/httpd/DOMAIN.COM /var/www/clients/clientNNN/webNNN/log    none    bind,nobootwait    0 0

After that do:

mount -a
mount

to verify it is mounted. After nightly cron, check that awstats or webalizer contains data.