TOLRA Community Forums - Blogs

Eee PC Recovery without CD

Paul — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:38:08 GMT

Having had the need to reinstall Windows XP on an Eee PC without being able to connect a CDROM drive directly to it, I came up with the following to use the supplied recovery image via a USB Flash Memory.

There's no guarantee this will work for you so use at your own risk.

You need:

PeToUSB from http://gocoding.com/page.php?al=petousb
USB Flash Memory, I used a 4GB stick.
The CD that came with the Eee PC

To make a bootable USB Flash Memory stick for recovery, you need to use a PC with a 32bit operating system, then:

From the recovery CD that came with the Eee PC extract WINPE.ISO using WinRAR or WinZIP to a folder on your PC e.g. c:\eeepc
In c:\eeepc\i386\system32 double click WNPESHL.INI and change:

AppPath=x:\EPCRecover.exe

to

AppPath=x:\GHOST32.EXE

Save the file
Connect a USB Flash Drive
Start PeToUSB
Destination Drive: USB Removable, and from the drop down select the letter for the drive you just connected
Format Options: Enable Disk Format
Tick Enable File Copy
Then in the Source Path to built bartpe/winpe files: click the browse button to the right and select the folder e.g. c:\eeepc
Click Start and Yes
Wait while it formats the Flash drive and copies the boot files to it.
Close PeToUSB
Copy the whole Recovery folder from the Eee PC CD ROM to the USB Flash Drive, this should be one or more .gho files.

To Test:

Plug into Eee PC and boot it, press Escape as the Eee PC goes through the BIOS and then select the USB Flash Drive as the boot device
If all works as it should you're in Ghost and can restore the disk image , the .gho files, to the Eee PC.

Backup

You can go a step further an use Ghost on the Flash Drive you just made to make an image of your current partitions so that the Eee PC can be restored to it's current state rather then the factory default.

Slide show in MODx

tolra — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:40:22 GMT

The following MODx snippet allows you to create image slide shows where the current image fades into the next image in the sequence. The snippet allows for multiple slide shows per page with the possibility of displaying text for each image and having each taking the visitor to a different URL when clicked.

Install

Download the attached ZIP file.
Create a snippet called rotatingPics and paste the contents of the file snippet.php into it.
In the document to show the slide show add [!rotatingPics?id=`pics`!]
pics is the name of this slide show and must be unique for each slide show.

Add and adjust the following to your sites CSS file, pics in each CSS rule should be replace with the slide show name:

HTML Code:

#pics_out { width: 200px; height: 200px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 50% 50%; display: block; }
#pics_in { width: 200px; height: 200px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 50% 50%; display: block; cursor: pointer; }
#pics_txt { width: 200px; height: 3em; background-color: #ccc; padding: 4px; text-align: left; }

Create a XMLfile in the assets/files folder of the same name as your slide show e.g. pics.xml and add as many blocks as required. example.xml in the ZIP file provides a starting place.

Additional Parameters

¬ext=`1` to remove text from the images.

&withClick=`1` to make the images clickable.

Attached Files

imagerotate.zip (3.7 KB, 1141 views)

Is your website infected with a parasite?

tolra — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:39:52 GMT

With hackers exploiting security vulnerabilities in popular scripts there are vast numbers of sites infected with parasites and their owners are unaware.

http://www.unmaskparasites.com/ provides an easy way to scan your web pages for suspicious content.

If suspicious content is found then you need to clean up, the basic steps for that are:

Run a full virus and spyware scan on your computer, because you've visited your own site your computer may now be infected.
Remove the malicious code from the pages of your site.
Recheck your pages with http://www.unmaskparasites.com/
If your site was flagged by Google then request a review via http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

If you have any problems then your web designer should be your first point of contact and your web host may be able to help you.

Is your site IE8 compatible?

tolra — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:39:32 GMT

Microsoft recently released Internet Explorer 8 and with it increased the number of browsers that a site has to be compatible with. While IE8 claims to better support standards it also does not render all sites the same as IE7 did.

Microsoft attempted to solve this incompatibility by providing an IE7 compatibility mode which can be enabled by end users by clicking the "Compatibility View" button at the right end of the address bar. However if your site fails to display correctly in IE8 then it will show broken until the user clicks this button.

Your visitors are important, you wouldn't have a web site it they weren't, therefore you want to provide them with the best possible experience when visiting your site therefore you should check your site in IE8 looking for any errors.

If your site works perfectly then that's all you need to do, however if you find errors you have two choices to solve them.

The first and probably the most obvious choice is to contract your web designer to update the site to function with IE8, IE7, IE6, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

The other option is to add a header to force IE8 to display your site in compatibility mode, this is simply a case of editing your .htaccess file and adding the following line:

Code:

Header set X-UA-Compatible "IE=EmulateIE7"

Once you save and upload your .htaccess file IE8 will automatically change to IE7 compatibility mode, you should now recheck your site as the compatibility mode is not exactly the same as IE7.

If you are unsure as to the best way to proceed then talk to your web designer, they can check your site and advise you of the best course of action.

Should I use 'www' or not?

tolra — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:05:16 GMT

The question of should you be using www or not in site names comes up repeatedly, however the answer is quite simple it doesn't matter which version you.

What does matter is that you consistently use your chosen form and that you correctly redirect visitors and search engines to your chosen form should they arrive on the alternate. That is if you choose webtalkmail.com then a visitor entering www.webtalkmail.com should be redirected to webtalkmail.com using a permanent redirect.

Why do you need this redirection? You need it to stop your site appearing on two different URLs. If your site does show for two URL then it could cause duplicate content issues with search engines and result in poor ranking.

You can easily test if your site suffers this problem:

First going to your site with the www at the start e.g. www,webtalkmail.com
Once your page loads make a note of the address in the browsers address bar
Now go to your site without the www e.g. webtalkmail.com
Again make a note of the address shown in the browsers address bar.

If the addresses from steps 2 and 4 match then your site is properly redirecting visitors and search engines, however if the addresses differ then you need to consider adding a redirect.

A redirect is added to your sites .htaccess file, you make not have an existing .htaccess file in which case you can just create one. The following three lines when placed in .htaccess redirect visitors entering www.webtalkmail.com to our chosen form of webtalkmail.com:

Code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^webtalkmail\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://webtalkmail.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Had we chosen ww.webtalkmail.com as our domain then we would have used the following to redirect from the non-www form:

Code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.webtalkmail\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.webtalkmail.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To use the above you simply need to choose the form of domain name and then change the domain from webtalkmail.com to yours.

Why are Software Updates Important to me?

tolra — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:04:47 GMT

The criminal element of the web are continuously probing websites looking for weaknesses where they can get a foothold, once they find a way into a site they can use the compromised site to launch attacks against visitors as they browse your site, for sending spam, attacking other sites or some other nefarious task.

Responsible software developers react to flaws that are found in their products and release updated version of their software. However if you are not keeping the scripts installed on your site up to date then you will not be benefiting from these security updates which may mean that your site is more at risk than it should be.

You should also remember that the likes of Google scan sites for some types of compromise and show a warning to a visitor trying to visit the site. Imagine a visitor to your online site seeing a message along the lines of "This site may harm your computer", it's not hard to imagine the visitor hitting the back button and going to a competitor's site.

Therefore an important part of maintaining an online presence is to perform maintenance to keep your software current.

Users running old versions of WordPress are strongly encouraged upgrade to the latest version, 2.7.1 at the time of writing, and to verify their site for hidden spam text and other hacks.

Where you are not confident to apply patches and updates then in many cases your provider can do this for you under a maintenance contract.

What's a Canonical & why I should specify it?

tolra — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 10:45:22 GMT

Google and other search engines now support a new tag to deal with the problem of duplicate content caused by being able to access identical or near identical content via multiple URLs.

If we take an example URL of http://www.example.com/product.php?item=widget then it will show the widget product page. If now extra data is appended to the URL say for visitor tracking through the store then the URL may be http://www.example.com/product.php?item=widget&trackid=1234. As the tracking ID is always changing you have many pages with identical content but accessible via different URLs.

Simply adding the new tag to the section of the page allows you to specify your preferred form e.g.

HTML Code:

"canonical" href=http://www.example.com/product.php?item=widget />

Now as Google indexes the pages it understands that the duplicates refer to the canonical URL http://www.example.com/product.php?item=widget and transfers page rank and other properties to the page.

Although in the above example an absolute URL was given, a relative URL is perfectly acceptable and will be resolved according to the URL if given.

For those using MODx CMS then this tag can be useful as the default .htaccess rules for Friendly URLs allows content to be accessed both with and without the .html e.g. www.example.com/test/, www.example.com/test and www.example.com/test.html all show the same page. Modification of the rewrite rule can solve this so only the form ending .html produces the page however MODx then no longer controls 404 page generation.

The alternative is to add the following to the templates just below the tag:

HTML Code:

"canonical" href="[~[*id*]~]" />

Profile and Entertainment Websites

Paul — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:11:46 GMT

With On The Barrier receiving a steady flow of visitors interested in reading the latest news and interviews from the music scene Attitude e-media has recently launched a new service aimed at creating websites for those in the entertainment industry.

Image by Attitude is specialising in profile and entertainment websites rather than the standard business sites most web designers produce. That means entertainer and musician websites built to engage fans, promoters and those looking for their services without being constrained by normal business site designs.

If you're a musician or entertainer then don't forget to head over to Live On The Barrier and tell the world about yourself.

Hosting 2 or more domains on one hosting account

tolra — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:15:16 GMT

Some web hosting accounts allow you to host multiple domains names each with a completely independent website on it, the following attempts to clarify how to do that without allowing content from addon domains to be visible via the main account domain. It also attempts to show that once correctly configured there's no difference between many domains on one account and many accounts on one server.

cPanel

We'll start with the case of cPanel based hosting, the following will work for all our shared hosting plans except our STARTER-1 plan. We assume in the following text that the account has the domain http://www.tolranet.co.uk/ assigned to it and that we wish to add the domain http://www.tolranet.com/ to the account.

Once you login to your cPanel account there is an option available, Addon domains, click the link and you are prompted to enter the information for the domain you wish to add to your account.

You start by entering the domain name, tolranet.com, into the New Domain Name box, when you press tab to move to the next field cPanel will automatically set the Document Root field to be public_html/tolranet.com.

The problem is that if you leave the Document Root as that then the web space for the new domain will be inside the web space for the accounts domain, this allows you to access it as both http://www.tolranet.com/ and http://www.tolranet.co.uk/tolranet.com/ this obviously has potential issues for duplicate content.

The solution is quite simple in that when adding the domain edit the Document Root field and remove public_html from it so it just becomes tolranet.com now your domain has it's web space outside of the accounts web space and so can only be accessed by its domain and not that of the account.

As a side note this is also true when creating sub-domains.

Now as you can't access the addon domains content via the main account domain there's no difference in hosting two or more domains on the same account or having two or more accounts on the same server, they both behave independently.

Other

If however your host is using a control panel which will not allow you to create web space for the addon domains outside of your main web space then you have to use rules in a .htaccess file placed within the folder assigned to each addon domain.

If you have the addon domain tolranet.com and it's web space is public_html/tolranet.com then in public_html/tolranet.com you'd place an .htaccess containing the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.tolranet\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.tolranet.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That rule simply states if the domain name used to access the site is not www.tolranet.com then do a permanent redirect to http://www.tolranet.com/

Again you can't access the content of the addon domain via the main domain because doing so will, in our example, cause the domain name to be www.tolranet.co.uk which in turn results in the .htaccess file redirecting the browser. So once again there's no difference in many domains per account or many accounts per server.

There is one issue however with addon domains being in folders of the main domain that you should be aware of and that is the rules in the .htaccess file in public_html are inherited by all the addon domains.

Moving Servers

With addon domains, if you ever wish to move your addon domains to different servers as your sites grow then you have move the site manually, that is backup the files and databases for the addon domain then upload them to the new location. If you use independent accounts then cPanel allows the server admin to trivially move an entire account to a new server often without you having to do anything.

Why backup multiple times per day?

tolra — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:21:37 GMT

We are often asked why we provide multiple time per day backups for our web hosting clients when other hosts backup only once per day or maybe even only once per month.

In the modern internet websites are now often more than just a few simple pages that change now and then they are dynamic beasts that can take data from multiple sources including users and then change continuously to present this new data.

If we use the music social network site On The Barrier (1) as an example, then the main site is based on MODx, a Content Management System (CMS). This works in a fairly traditional in that information is added to the site periodically by the authors and change is slow as only a couple of stories may be added per day. However the stories are written online directly into the MODx CMS therefore unlike a traditional static site where pages are created locally and uploaded here there is only the live copy stored in the database.

With just the single live copy in the database should disaster strike and if backups are being made once per day then all the stories added in the last day since the last backup will need to be added once again when the site is restored. If backups were being made less frequently say once a month, then a months worth of information will have to be entered back into the system, if stories were originally written from notes then it may never be possible to rebuild the lost data.

Moving onto Live On The Barrier, then this is a forum and social network that contains members blogs, images, music videos and social groups. This is obviously potentially far more dynamic than the main portion of the site as there is potential for may updates per day.

It would be very unlikely that if a days worth of blog entries and forum discussion was lost that it would ever be recovered and if backups ran once per month then a significant amount of data could be lost never to be recovered. This could well disrupt the flow of ongoing discussions, loose blog posts people had worked hard to create with the result members loosing interest in the site.

If you next take the case of an online store doing 10 sales per hour then in the course of a day that could be 240 sales, if a days worth of sales information is lost then the store owner has to contact up to 240 people from just the information stored in their merchant account and recover the orders.

We, TOLRA, utilise Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology from R1Soft to allow us to backup our hosting clients data as frequently as once per hour, that is should disaster strike their site they should never loose more than an hours worth of data which is a significant gain over the loss of a days data.

In the case of a social network this should result in less lost information from users and thus reducing the number of disgruntled members and so the negative impact on the site. Even for the main site there's less chance of a story that has been written from notes being lost forever.

While in the case of an e-commerce site if only an hours trading is lost then the store owner may only need to contact and manually recreate 10 orders rather than over 200 which is significantly less work and as they say time is money.

So if you are running a dynamic site such as a social network or e-commerce store can you afford not to have frequent backups?

You can read more about out continuous data protect strategy for our web hosting clients at our web hosting backup page, the current data retention policy is also explained within the page.

Note (1): We do not host or operate On The Barrier it is instead owned and operated by a friend of mine and simply used as an example.

Moving your site to a new server with minimum downtime

tolra — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:06:36 GMT

There are times when you need to move a website between servers maybe because you are changing hosts or otherwise change its IP address, the following helps to reduce the time that both the old and new sites are operating in tandem.

Note: This method does assume that your current host provides sufficient access to edit your DNS zone, or your new host can take on the nameserver roll before starting to host the actual data.

Within the domains zone each entry will have a TTL (time-to-live) value, this will either be explicitly set for the entries or the default. TTL is the minimum time that data will remain cached in other nameservers and is given in seconds.

Code:

An example zone file:
$TTL 14400
example.com. 86400 IN SOA ns1.tolradns.net. hostmaster.example.com. (
2009012403 ;Serial Number
14400 ;refresh
7200 ;retry
2419200 ;expire
3600 ;minimum
)
example.com.    86400   IN      NS      ns1.tolradns.net.
example.com.    86400   IN      NS      ns2.tolradns.net.
example.com.    86400   IN      NS      ns3.tolradns.net.

example.com.    IN      A       192.168.100.10
example.com.    IN      MX      5       mail.example.com.
mail    IN      A   192.168.100.10
www     IN      CNAME   example.com.

The first step is to look up the current TTL value in the domains zone file, in this case it's using a default of 14400 seconds or 4 hours. Therefore any changes we make need to be made a minimum of 4 hours before the move.

So first thing we do is lower the TTL to a very small value, 60 seconds is a reasonable value, and reload the zone file.

Code:

$TTL 60

Once you are ready to move to the new server, copy the files and databases over then update the IP addresses within the zone file to be those of the new server.

Once the site is moved over then return the TTL value to a longer value in order to decrease load on the nameservers and ensure proper caching.

If the nameservers also need to be updated then they can be done after the move to ensure no interruption.

Some systems may cache DNS records for an extended period ignoring the TTL values give, for these the updates will happen in their own time but for the majority of users the move will be a minute or so.

Minimizing the time both systems are running for is especially important for dynamic sites such as forums or stores as the old site has to be switched off to avoid posts or orders being lost when the user places them on the wrong site because the user is still using the old cached DNS information.

In the case of changing hosting providers if your current host can't or will not shorten the TTL to aid with a quick move then your new host can create the zone information for your domain on their nameservers but using the current server IP.

You can now update your domains nameserver records to be those of the new provider, after 24 hours your new host is providing DNS services while your old host continues to serve the site. As your new provider now has control of the zone files they can lower the TTL values and move the site as described above.

We have done this many times over the years when taking on new hosting clients who need to minimize disruption.

Update: Added if you old host can't or will not help.

What are subdomains?

tolra — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 10:21:50 GMT

If we take the domain tolranet.com as an example, then forums.tolranet.com is a subdomain of tolranet.com as is support.tolranet.com and status.tolranet.com.

A subdomain is simply a lower domain within the domain name hierarchy. Therefore tolranet is also a subdomain of the toplevel domain (TLD) com.

A subdomain can point to the same server as the parent domain or a separate server but in both cases it is normal for the content on the subdomain to be independent from the parent, a separate site if you will.

All but the smallest of our shared web hosting plans allow the account owner to create a number of subdomains for use with the accounts main domain.

What are Addon Domains?

tolra — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:28:56 GMT

When you sign up for a hosting account you get a single account which functions for the domain you gave during the sign up process.

If you then use an addon domain you can make the account serve data for an additional domain name as well as the original domain. The addon domain takes it's data from a different folder to the main domain which allows you to have different content for each unlike parked domains which share the same content.

With your hosting account you can ceate addon domains as folders within the accounts public_html folder or as folders outside of public_html. It is generally better to create addon domains outside of public_html as it removes any risk of being able to access the addon domains content through the main domain.

Therefore addon domains allow you to run more than one site from a single hosting account.

Windows Live Sync

Paul — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:27:52 GMT

I needed a lightweight simple way of sharing files with a friend and colleague while we were working on a project together, at the time I discovered FolderShare from Microsoft, it was not the normal Microsoft bloat and it just worked.

Microsoft have now renamed in Windows Live Sync and after a slightly rocky start it is now running flawlessly.

Drop a file into the shared folder and it's propagated to all the machines sharing that folder no matter where they are in the world.

As with FolderShare, Live Sync doesn't have any of the bells and whistles associated with collaboration suites, for example it won�t notify you of updates or provide a history of who edited which files, so while it may not be suitable for all applications it is worth a look if you need a simple way of sharing files between people.c

Web Hosting Affiliate Scheme

tolra — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:26:46 GMT

TOLRA has been working on an affiliate program and we are now ready to open the doors and start accepting affiliates.

Affiliates are provided with the HTML for various premade ads which can then be placed on the affiliates website. When clicked the affiliate is credited for the click and if the visitor purchase from web hosting or a script from TOLRA the affiliate is credited with the commission fee.

For every web hosting signup or script purchase the affiliate account will be credited with 20% of the customers first invoice.

More information can be found in our forums at http://forums.tolranet.com/showthread.php?t=240

Then when you are ready to get started as an affiliate visit https://www.tolranet.com/affiliates/