Mark Wilding

I've no intention of arguing. I didn't think I was.

Maybe he's on holiday: Last Seen: 14th December 2008 Could explain the severe downtime issues over the last few days! that's your theory... he just left for holiday leaving the server and all of our sites to become useless. if that is the case djbob has no respect for any of the people hosting their sites on heliohost. Sorry if it sounded like I meant to accuse djbob of going away and leaving Heliohost to go to rot. I certainly wouldn't have said that. My two posts weren't meant to be related particularly - I was just picking up on the earlier comment in the second post.

I hate to be negative about Heliohost, but the downtime recently has been bad enough that I'm considering moving to another host. I'm really reluctant to do this, because I think Heliohost is fantastic in theory and the facilities it offers are unparalleled among free hosts, but recently my account has been useless, because almost every time I try visiting my site it's down for one reason or another. I appreciate that there have been a lot of difficulties with the new server and I don't wish to seem like I'm getting at djbob - I understand how difficult these sorts of problems can be to resolve. All I'd like to know is, realistically, is there a good chance that the uptime is going to improve any time soon? If so, I'll be patient and stick with it, but otherwise, I need a site that I can rely on to be working most of the time. Maybe he's on holiday: Last Seen: 14th December 2008 Could explain the severe downtime issues over the last few days!

Yes, for a start I'd like to auto-forward all emails to a single address. I've just added a new add-on domain and would like to handle the mail coming to this. I've tried setting the MX entry to point to my heliohost domain (markwilding.heliohost.org), but this does seem to have helped. The "Managing" dropdown is set to "all domains". I'd also like to forward emails differently based on the to-address, but if I can get them coming through at all, it will be easy to configure multiple forwarders to do that, I'm sure. No problem - I know you've had plenty more pressing issues to deal with.

Is this problem related to the 403s we've been seeing so much of over the last few days (as noted in http://www.helionet.org/index/index.php?showtopic=3879)? Or is this another issue relating to running so many accounts on the one server?

I'm trying to set up various filters on emails coming to the domain names I have pointing to my Heliohost account (as addon domains, e.g. markandhanna.co.uk). What I actually want to do is forward any messages coming to particular addresses to different email addresses (e.g. mark@markandhanna.co.uk forwarding to my personal email address). The first thing I tried was setting the default address for one of the domains in cPanel. I chose the "forward to email address" option and this didn't seem to work. The "discard with error to sender" option, however, did exactly what it should have done and I got the failure message bouncing back correctly. I then thought I'd try setting this domain back to the default email account. The help text in cPanel tells you you can put your username in the "forward to email address" field to direct messages to your default account, as is set by default. However, the validation on this field actually prevents you from setting it to this value, since it's not a valid email address. Firstly, how can I get this option to set back to the default (my username)? Secondly, how should I actually be going about this task? It seems to me like setting the default address for the domain to forward to my normal email account and then using forwarders to handle all other cases is the sensible way to do it. Or maybe I should be using account-level filtering.

Great. I've actually tried adding it as a parked domain, which works perfectly. This also mean any old links to the Heliohost address will still work, of course. Thanks!

I've just purchased a nice new domain name - markandhanna.co.uk - and I'd like to use it as the main domain name for my Heliohost account, currently markwilding.heliohost.org. I've set the DNS addresses to ns1.heliohost.org and ns2.heliohost.org and this all shows up correctly on a whois for markandhanna.co.uk now. Also, thanks so much, djbob, for all your hard work recently. Things seem to be all sorted now and it's really good to know that Heliohost is back on its feet.

Reformatting the disk without backing up people's data is not an acceptable option. Whilst we all know that it's our responsibility to keep backups of our own data, we do assume that the site admins are not going to wipe our accounts deliberately. It's certainly wouldn't do any good to Heliohost's reputation in the long term. Djbob aims to provide a professional level of hosting for free and this isn't what you'd expect of a professional host. If the drive is wiped, we'd need a month's notice, with a message on cPanel. Users are required to sign in every month to keep their account, so that's the only way to ensure that everyone knows (at least, everyone who can legitimately expect to keep their account). Sorry, I didn't notice the last page of this thread. Very stupid. Still, I was unable to post this reply for a while, just getting 500s. Seems to be happening quite a lot on my site too at the moment.

Cool, thanks. All fine now.

Sometime over the last few days, my hosting account (markwilding.heliohost.org) was suspended. I'm not sure why this would be - I've signed into cPanel recently and, in fact, it was only very recently transferred to the new server. I've not been using it heavily - it's running MediaWiki, but nothing very heavy - and I certainly having been overusing the bandwidth. I did receive a notification email a while ago saying that my account was going to expire, but it said the account would be suspended "in seven days on Wednesday, December 31st", which makes no sense at all! I assumed it was a mistake, but hastily signed into cPanel to make sure everything was ok. It was after that that I was transferred to Stevie. Hope this can be sorted soon and that I haven't done anything wrong! Mark

Looks absolutely fantastic! This is definitely going to draw in far more people. The only thing I can think of that would make it a little easier to handle at first glance would be if the introductory passage and news box were swapped with the features box, currently at the top, particularly with the ad in between. I think the first thing a visitor sees should be the introduction. Not important - just what I'd do. Great work!

I have a helpful, though mystifying observation that will be interesting to anyone else who's had this problem. When the database starts playing up (as it has been doing now and again since my first post above), if I login to phpMyAdmin and go to the status page, I see some strange errors, clearly because it's having trouble querying the database. However, at this point the problems disappear: the database then works fine again. If I refresh the status page, it now has no trouble. Every time, according to the messages on the status page, the mysql server restarted at the time when I first tried viewing the status page (i.e. when it didn't work). It's as if trying to view it and getting the errors triggers the server to restart. Very odd, but handy to know when things go wrong.

Theses changes sound great. I'm really glad to hear that the Heliohost site will be revamped. Since I signed up, I've been amazed by how good Heliohost is and it is a shame that up to now this hasn't really been reflected by the main site. I'm sure that improving the site will attract far more new members of the sort you're after! I only hope that you can manage to make enough money out of it, once these changes go through.

If you click on one of the descriptions of the plans, it takes you to a Helionet article describing that plan, which includes a link to the registration page: http://heliohost.org/scripts/signup.php. Your problem is entirely understandable. It took me ages to find as well, but it's well worth it when you do! Hope that helps.

Aha, thanks. That's not surprising, I suppose, since I can't imagine many people need to run latex on the server!

They should just be those 4 commands: "latex", "gs", "dvips" and "convert". If they're installed they should be on the path, I believe. You could also try "locate latex", etc. Cheers.

Just command-line tools, I believe.

Hi, I'm trying to set up the Latex functionality for my MediaWiki, so that I can use Latex math markup on my pages. This is built into MediaWiki and the MediaWiki installation comes with a directory called "math" containing the source files for a tool called "texvc". texvc is run to produce an image for the page from the Latex input. I need to build these files, so that I have the texvc tool, but can't do this without shell access. If Ocaml is installed (which it may not be), this should just be a question of going to the math directory and running make (I've tried this on my local box and it works fine). Is there any way I can do this or get it done for me? Cheers, Mark UPDATE: I've tried using the binary version of texvc, which seems to run. However, it now complains that the png conversion failed. Do we have latex, dvips, gs, and convert installed? This is what happens when I try parsing Tex: http://markwilding.heliohost.org/mwiki/ind...?title=Tex_Test .

As you can see from my posts in another thread, I've been having similar problems to those you describe here recently. After finding your post I thought perhaps the problem would disappear as you say it did before for you, but it's now been a couple of days since it started and I'm still getting the same errors. I wondered whether you'd come across any more information on what might be causing the problem or, better still, how it could be fixed! I notice that your wiki is currently having the same problems, which suggests that perhaps it's not an error in our databases themselves. Cheers, Mark Edit: I was just perusing the mysql admin and noticed that the mysql server was restarted 5 minutes ago. Sure enough, my database is up and running again. I'm extremely happy about this, as you can imagine. Would be very interesting to know what the problem might be.

Unfortunately, the problem has not yet gone away. My wiki can be found here, which will demonstrate the problem. I notice that Jioruji's site is also displaying the same errors, so it's not something specific to my wiki. Anyone got any ideas? MySql configuration issue, perhaps? Update: the problem went away when the MySql server was restarted. I still don't know what it was, so if anyone happens to have any ideas, it will be handy next time it happens!

I've just come across a previous post from about a month ago by someone who had the same problem: the previous post. I suppose I'll just keep trying my site again and, if my problem is the same, it should come back when the cache is cleared. Sorry, I didn't see this post before. I'll post again if my problem doesn't resolve itself!

Since posting this, I've tried getting a dump of the offending database. Rather disturbingly, this was empty. Has my database been lost or dropped for some reason?

I have one mysql database set up for my account, which I'm using as the backend for a MediaWiki wiki. I've just found that I'm unable to read from the database. If I try checking it through the cPanel interface, I get a lot of messages of the form mwilding_wikidb.archive error : Incorrect information in file: './mwilding_wikidb/archive.frm' I think there's one of these for every table in the database. Have you any idea what might have caused this? Is it possible that the database files have been lost somehow? Cheers.