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.
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.
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.
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
When trying to install Samsung Kies 3 on a Windows 10 machine, the error message “Side by side configuration is incorrect” was displayed.
The reason to this error is that the Visual C++ 2008 runtime is not installed.
To solve the problem you need to download and install Microsoft Visual C++ 2008.
Download it from these links (directly from Microsoft), install them and then retry the Kies installation:
The problem seems to be caused by two updates from Microsoft; KB2837618 and KB2837643.
There is a simple solution though:
Today, august 14, the site celebrates 10 years of supplying technical solutions to tech nerds all over the world! The first post was written on august 14, 2008. Happy anniversary to nerdia.net!
Do you have technical solutions or other things you find would be suitable to publish here – send me a message through the contact form.
A Windows 10 user contacted me because the desktop had disappeared.
The first thing to check is if Windows is in “Tablet mode” which disables the desktop.
If this doesn’t help the user profile might have become broken. In this case, the solution is (description below is just short notes taken from my memory):
If you end up missing the menu etc in Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 and 17.04, i.e. you only see the desktop but nothing more. You can’t even restart the machine.
It can be resolved like this:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity
sudo shutdown -r now
Using PrestaShop 1.6.1.18, this was an older shop that had been offline for a couple of years. It had been upgraded in steps from PrestaShop 1.4 via 1.5 to 1.6. While testing it before relaunch of the shop a problem was discovered. Sometimes when adding a product to the shopping cart, another random product was added. When testing the shop in incognito/private mode this happened more frequent.
It turned out to be a discrepancy between cart ID:s in the two tables ps_cart and ps_cart_product.
Solution: