Computer Nerd Kev

Hello, I use the forum's RSS feed feature to keep up with new posts in the "News" forum, but it seems to have stopped being updated. The latest post is currently "Reboot Eddie", so it's missing the latest four threads.

Hello, I may have stuffed up the system by deciding to create a new account before looking though some of the more recent forum posts describing the process for donation users. Original "Tommy" account details: user: cnk main domain: computernerdkev.heliohost.org Sub-Domains: ombertech.com, antihttps.com email: Well I'd prefer not to put that one out in public, but it's @safe-mail.net, which might narrow things down enough anyway. Donation "Perks": 2000MB storage, 4 months account expiry immunity (as I remember it) The "Create Account" page wouldn't let me reuse, "cnk", so I registered "cnk2", but would prefer "cnk" to avoid any trouble with changing the account name (quite a lot of custom PHP scripts, and you never know how unwisely I might have written some of them , also possible permissions problems). It did let me reuse "computernerdkev.heliohost.org", and the email address. Now, over an hour after the website said that the account was in queue to be created, it's saying "There is no account in our database that matches that username". Gah! So can I please have my old account details configured on Ricky. I'll dig through the PayPal history now and try to find the transaction ID of my last donation (via GoFundMe, so I'm not sure who it will say the receiver was), will post it once I've found it. In terms of backups, I should have copies of everything except some recent user-contributed stuff which I'll want to get from the Tommy backups when they're available. I think I'll just make a temporary set up then wipe it out with the Tommy backup when that's ready. Or if it's going to be ready any minute now, please tell me and it will save a lot of wasted time! Thanks.

Ah, thanks. I'll be more patient with it for now then.

Are you using a recent version of Filezilla? If it's an old version, it's possible that Tommy is requiring a more recent encryption cypher to be used than is supported. Upgrading Filezilla should fix that. Note that if you connect via plain FTP for a test, this will expose your account password unencrypted over your internet connection. Whether that's a problem or not depends on how serious you want to take security (if you don't care at all, you might as well just use FTP all the time). You can connect to an anonymous ftp server such as ftp.funet.fi (port" 21 username: anonymous password: blank/anonymous/anything) to simply test if Filezilla is working at all. Not tried, but this site lists some public SFTP servers which you to use to test whether SFTP is working for you at all: https://sftp.net/public-online-sftp-servers

The logs have stopped again - they've been at 21st of May for a few days now, possibly since my last post.

Thanks, the log progress hadn't moved much for at least a week. It has jumped forwards now and hopefully it will keep on marching.

Hello, The access logging for the domains on my account stopped on the 11th. I think this happened once before after Tommy's /var became full.

@Krydos: Thank you. @icn: There's no "sendmail" on the functions list in the PHP manual, so that must be using one of the 3rd party libraries. I've noted a few, such as the Mail package in PEAR and PHPMailer. I try to avoid using libraries/packages to make to site easier to test and maintain, but I'll probably end up using one for this at some point.

Thanks, I'll consider using 3rd party Email libraries later but for now that adds up to (100*3)+75+200 = 575 as my desired Email limit, going on what I wrote before. Can I request here for my limit to be raised to 600? I might do the image conversions manually for starters. If the threshold is flexible that makes it a bit hard to be confident, it could work all the time during testing then one day someone uploads a large image while there happens to be high load and suddenly I'm kicked out. Though limiting the upload size to 1 or 2MB might prevent the worst cases.

Server = Tommy Root Domain = computernerdkev.heliohost.org Reading posts on the forum, I've noticed the 50 Email per day limit. I wasn't aware of this when I designed my online store (by which I mean wrote all the code from scratch in PHP) in 2017, but so far it hasn't been successful enough to be a problem anyway. Nevertheless I've got a couple of expansions in the works and they could lead to more Email traffic. One part will involve users submitting digital content to be sold, similar(ish) to Ebay, and I may decide to implement a user setting where instead of "sellers" getting an Email for each sale, they get a weekly summary. This would mean sending an Email to all "sellers" once a week, so that would lower the headroom for other Emails on that day. For the moment though, for each order an Email is sent to me, and to the buyer. Also, for a bit of redundancy in case of outages, I have the Emails for me sent to an Email account on the HelioHost server, which forwards them to an account registered with another Email provider. So, Question 1 is: Does this (previous paragraph) equal 2 Emails, or 3 Emails (or 1 Email, if neither Emails to accounts on the HelioHost server, nor automatic forwarding to external accounts, are included in the count (if so, that's proably a bit of a loop-hole)). Also, searching through the forums I've found that HelioHost is happy with extending the limit if users can convince them that they're not a spammer. It seems that I still need to work out a new limit to request though, which is a little tricky. If I were to say that I'd never expect more than 100 orders a day, that would probably make 100x[answer to question 1] per day, plus another 75 for Emails to "sellers" in that part of the store. Then plus the number of sellers I can expect to turn on the weekly summary function if I decide to include it, which is really quite hard to guess... perhaps I'll say 200, but I want to say more. Given that I find setting a limit within the range of past requests so difficult. I'm tempted to simply configure the PHP mail() function, which I've used, naturally enough, for all the automated Emails, to use an external Email server. This turns out to be easier said than done on Linux. I wanted to use msmtp if it were available and configure PHP to use it in place of sendmail (with command line options setting it to use my desired SMTP server), but it turns out the PHP configuration option to set the command used by the mail() function can't be changed in .user.ini, only in php.ini. I know there are other ways to send Email from PHP besides mail(), but I don't want to change the code, and mail() looks to be the simplest and easiest method to program. Question 2 is: Is there any recommended way to set an external server for sending Email from PHP using mail() within the limits of a Heliohost account? Finally, on another topic. Part of the digital marketplace type site that I described earlier will be to have images uploaded by users to match their products (up to around six). Ideally I'd use the PHP "GD" functions to resize these images to three sizes (and probably delete the original to save space). Question 3 is: Assuming that I allow for large image sizes to be uploaded, would resizing six high-res JPEG images to three different sizes (18 conversions) in one script be enough to risk triggering excessive CPU usage and cause my account to be suspended. Keep in mind that this would be a somewhat infrequent event. Initially some manual verification may be required for each new listing, so if I have to do the image conversions on my own computer as well, that wouldn't be a huge issue. Thank you, and sorry for the long post. PS. I really think that the Email limit should be mentioned somewhere on the Wiki along with the other limits. Answers to Krydos' standard four questions for the over-zealous Emailer: How do you get the email addresses for your mails? Either I programmed them into the PHP scripts (the emails sent to me), or users submitted them when placing an order. Coming soon: Sellers submit them during account creation. How do people unsubscribe from the emails? I give up all this nonsense and close down the whole website. Users choose not to place any more orders (the only thing that causes an Email to be sent to them is when an order is paid for (or fails to be paid for) and when an item is posted)). Coming soon: Sellers close their account on my website. How many emails do you expect to send a day to begin with? Answer question 1, then see following paragraph. Please provide an example email. Grumble, grumble. OK here are some redacted examples from when I was first testing the site: Buyer successfully paid for an order Buyer unsuccessfully paid for an order (payment details didn't match the order correctly) Buyer's order has been posted The Email format for the marketplace bit of the site hasn't been done yet. This includes emails to sellers, and order confirmation emails for digital-only orders which may include temporary links for downloads. The Emails to me are basically the same but less polite and with technical detail about the payment errors.

I think the articles were too low key to meet their standards. Basically they might say "so they're a web host, and people write about them on websites about web hosts, big deal". I get the impression that HelioHost would have to get mentioned on some of the major news sites in articles which discuss it specifically. The likes of arstechnica.com and theregister.co.uk may be the bare minimum level of "mainstream" for an article there to be considered justification to add a page to Wikipedia (note that I don't agree that this is right, I think Wikipedia should be much more open to specific and slightly obscure pages, but I guess I'm always free to go set up my own user-contribution website...). Nevertheless I thought that HelioHost's funding model was unique enough that it made HelioHost obviously notable, which is why I thought the article could be accepted regardless of the limited references. It looks like Wikipedia editors aren't that flexible, but I still think that HelioHost is notable, and that just has to be reflected in the press before it can make it to Wikipedia. Perhaps HelioHost needs to take some hints from the tech start-up companies. I'm no PR expert, but it seems that things like the crypto-currency miner might have been a lost opportunity for making some noise in the direction of the major online tech news sites. Even the recent issue with Google pulling ads from the Heliohost pages, which I read buried in a recent forum thread, could have been (still is?) worthy of interesting articles in the press. "People's web host cut adrift by Google" or something like that. The key thing here is that the journalists who write these articles are generally lazy. Press releases are put out by the start-up companies and largely ripped by the small sites with as few modifications as the journalist involved thinks they can get away with. Ideally though, the attention from that filters up the the more respectable sites. To this end, a "press" section of the HelioHost website with background info and recent press releases may be a good help. And of course those press releases would be Emailed to all the relevant news sites as they were published. Anyway, that's just some of my thoughts. Of course getting on major news sites might itself be more helpful than having a Wikipedia page anyway. The reason I began this post was actually entirely different, I just wanted to point out that I've transcribed the Wikipedia page that I wrote into HTML and put it on my website so that at least it might get the occasional view by the wider world rather than just sit hidden in Wikpedia Drafts until someone eventually deletes it: http://computernerdkev.heliohost.org/heliohostinfo.htm

Well the article was rejected for not being notable enough - they're even more picky than I thought. I'm giving up at this point, but if someone else wants to get that other reference link approved for inclusion, find more references, argue with Wikipedia editors, etc. they're welcome.

Thanks Krydos, I've added the logo and some other info, including some more references to HelioHost pages for things that probably needed to be confirmed. I don't want to add references to the HelioNet Wiki because it probably breaks some Wikipedia rule and also might look a bit suspicious to the Wikipedia editors (if I had Wiki access, I could be referencing myself). I'll probably should get around to setting up a proper Wikipedia account at some point too...

This service can be a fun way to discover HelioHost sites, if you're bored enough: https://viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=tommy.heliohost.org&t=1 Only if they've registered a Top-Level Domain though.

Draft written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:HelioHost hostingadvice.com is apparantly on a Wikipedia links blacklist for some reason. I can't be bothered looking into that at the moment, let alone requesting an exemption, so I removed the references that I originally had to that article. If there's a logo available that would suit inclusion in the "infobox" at the side, it would be good if Krydos could provide me with a link and official permission to upload/use it there. I tried to keep the references to HelioNet topics to a minimum to avoid making the page look too inward looking, but perhaps I'd get away with more than one. This is my first Wikipedia article, so I may have got some things wrong. I also edited it in the ad breaks while watching the fourth Star Trek movie on TV, so if I start talking about Captain Kirk mid-way through, you know what happened. Anyway, edit or suggest as desired, and with a bit of luck this Wikipedia page will live long and prosper.

It sounds like it might be helpful to point out, for any users who've just discovered lots of error messages suddenly announcing themselves to the public, that error display in pages can be disabled with the "display.errors = off" setting in a .user.ini file placed in the web pages directory. Errors can be set to be written to a file using these directives: log_errors = on error_log = "~/logs/phperrors.txt" "~/logs/phperrors.txt" could be any other directory that's convenient. "error_reporting =" can also be included to determine which errors get written/displayed (see the PHP manual for option descriptions). I also have "display_startup_errors = off", but that probably isn't now on by default.

This is an archive of the deleted Wikipedia page without the HTML tags inseted in the text: http://deletionpedia.org/en/HelioHost Wikipedia Drafts may be an option to prepare for publishing a new page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Drafts Or not (but I'd be inclined to ignore this user): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_use_draftspace Just in case it helps.

The logs are up to Oct. 18th at the moment, looks good. Thanks for giving that script a "kick".

I just noticed that the HTTP access logs for my website (which is on Tommy) all stopped updating on October 16th. Both the main and sub domain log files have not been modified since, I wish I'd checked sooner. I can't see how I could have stuffed this up, so I guess it's a server issue. Main domain is: computernerdkev.heliohost.org Thanks for reading. EDIT: The log files in the "Current Raw Access Logs" section of the cPanel raw access logs page have been updating. It's the "archived" logs kept in ~/logs that stopped on Oct. 16th. On the same page: "Archive logs in your home directory at the end of each stats run every 24 hours." is checked. "Remove the previous month’s archived logs from your home directory at the end of each month." is unchecked. I'll delete some old ones in case there's a problem with having too many archived logs in the directory (though that would be a pretty poor bug).

I'm glad I read this. I was getting pretty worried about all the strange non-existent text files that were appearing in my web access logs.

From a user's perspective, if Tommy offers everything and has high uptime, there's no reason to choose Ricky over Tommy. The only reason for someone to choose Ricky would be because it could do something that couldn't be done with Tommy (PHP 5.3), or because they don't trust that Tommy will actually be stable. Unless you think that Tommy will be slower or have a significantly higher downtime, it seems that having PHP 5.3 would really be the only attraction Ricky has going for it. That's perhaps ignoring that it might be easier to "catch" the account creation opening with Ricky because it will probably be less popular. but if that's the only attraction, wouldn't it be better to just to have a second Tommy-like server to spread out the demand?

Transaction ID: 7M389371GM813472W19 Thanks.

Wow, that was quick! U/N: "cnk" ^ (that was the stevie username I asked to be transferred with the domain) Domain: "computernerdkev.heliohost.org" Thanks.

Hello, I sent a donation with instructions for my Stevie domain to be freed so that I can migrate to Tommy until the trouble is over. The tommy invite link ended with an "invalid" page, however the redirect didn't work properly with my browser (left me at a blank page with a new URL in the URL box which I manually told my browser to go to), so I thought there was a chance that the invite went through anyway. I tried to log in using my old username, but the password came back as invalid. I think the email address I used with the Stevie account was different from the one that my PayPal donation for the Tommy invite was sent from, so I tried again with the PayPal email and my old password. Still no luck. So I tried creating a new account with the PayPal email and the website presented me with a log in page noting old domain. However my old password didn't work at this log in page either. So I reset the password, first for my PayPal email, then for my old username (the reset email correctly went to my PayPal email address), then for my old email (which wasn't recognised). In all but the last case, I was able to enter a new password to use, but subsequent attempts to log in using it failed with "invalid". I also tried logging in at http://tommy.heliohost.org:2082/ with the user name and PayPal email. It didn't work either. I'm now officially sick of typing in my usernames and password. Some help would be welcome.

Not really. The link is now on the cpanel main page, but the logs page itself shows no logs under "current" or "archived". I've had a fairly close look for log files using FTP, searching through anything recently modified, but can't find anything that looks like a HTTP Access Log. I don't know where to expect it though. Attached is a screenshot of the logs page. EDIT: Thanks for looking into this, by the way.