Category: General

How to: Use WINMTR to Diagnose Network Issues

MTR is a great tool to understand if there is a routing issue. There are many times, customer says the website/web server is slow or not being able to access the network etc. After some basic checks, if no solution is concluded, it is important to get a MTR report from the client. As most of the users use Windows, it is common to use WinMTR.

To run WINMTR, you need to first download it from here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/winmtr/

or here

https://winmtr.en.uptodown.com/windows

Once the app is downloaded, double clicking it will open it. WinMTR is a portable executable binary. It doesn’t require installation.

Once opened, you can enter the ‘domain name’ that is having trouble in the ‘Host’ section and press start.

Start winMTR by entering your domain in the Host section

Once you start, it will start reaching the domain you entered and hit each of the node it passes for routing, with giving the amount of drops each node is hitting

WintMTR running – (I have hidden two hops for privacy)

If you are seeing drops of anything above 2-5%, that node is problematic. If the node is dropping a lot, but the next node isn’t dropping enough, then the node is set to transparently hiding the packet responses for security, then that node is not problematic. So if your packet isn’t reaching the destination and it is dropping somehwere or looping in a node, that means, the problem is within that node. Now you can locate the node and see where does it belong. If it belongs to within your territory, then the issue is within your ISP or IIG. But if it is outside your territory but at the end of the tail, then the issue is with the Host.

In most case, we ask for running the MTR for 5 minutes and then export to TEXT and send it over for us to analyse to customers. You can export the report by stopping the MTR and clicking ‘Export TEXT’ available in the winMTR window.

Backend log: PHP Warning: File upload error – unable to create a temporary file in Unknown on line 0

It is a common php error appears when PHP handler unable to detect the server temporary folder automatically. A solution to the problem is to define the upload_tmp_dir of the php explicitly. You can do that by editing the php.ini file. Here is an example on how to do it:

To find the running php.ini file, use phpinfo:

root@chicago1 [~]# php -r ‘phpinfo();’|grep php.ini
Configuration File (php.ini) Path => /opt/cpanel/ea-php56/root/etc
Loaded Configuration File => /opt/cpanel/ea-php56/root/etc/php.ini

As the command suggests, your php.ini file is located under the following:

/opt/cpanel/ea-php56/root/etc/php.ini

Now, edit the file using your favorite editor:
nano /opt/cpanel/ea-php56/root/etc/php.ini
Find the location of upload_tmp_dir, which is usually commented out like the following:

;upload_tmp_dir =

Uncomment it by removing the semicolon from front and define the temporary directory location:

upload_tmp_dir = /tmp

Restart your apache.

There is another way you can do it. To do this, go to WHM >> MultiPHP INI Editor >> Editor Mode >> Find upload_tmp_dir and edit it accordingly.

This would create a user.ini file to be included with the original php.ini file.

If none of the above solution works for you, you are probably seeing the error from modsecurity, try following the following steps to see if that overcomes the error:

ModSecurity: Multipart parsing error: Multipart: Failed to create file: /root/tmp/20170526-122120-WSfJYO2KhTvEz5johZF8UQAAAEw-file-9mmG15

How to Solve Force File System Quota Check on Every Boot RHEL/CentOS

I had been seeing an uprising issue of forced file system quota check on every boot after migrating to RHEL 6 or CentOS 6. I hadn’t seen the same issue before. I had been tackling it by changing the quotacheck file on each boot to something different. Quotacheck file is located:

$ ls /sbin/quotacheck

I couldn’t get enough information on something was changed in RHEL 6 which triggered this event. I went to trace out the root reason of this starting from Linux Boot Init script.

Continue reading “How to Solve Force File System Quota Check on Every Boot RHEL/CentOS”

Hostingseclist.com – Something worth subscribing!

Folks from RACK911 created a listing page called http://hostingseclist.com

Its a list of recent security notices related to web hosting industry. The list is pretty fast to notify when a vulnerability arrives and most of the cases, they include a discussion linking to Webhostingtalk. It is hard to subscribe to every product developer and keep updated with their latest bug reports. While HostingSecList seems to be collecting everything in one. They are also checking each of the bug reported before posting them online. They also list community reported bugs.

HostingSecList.com is something worth subscribing out of all spammers right these days!

How to open .gz file in Linux/Unix?

You need to use gzip/gunzip program to open/extract a .gz file. It is based on DEFLATE algorithm. All the Linux/Unix comes with default gzip/gunzip program as it is used as primary compression technique in Linux/Unix based system.

How to extract a .gz file?

gunzip yourcompressfile.gz

or

gzip -d yourcompressfile.gz

-d refers to decompress the gzip file.

To view the latest file, type

ls -l

How to extract tar.gz file?

tar.gz files are tar files compressed with gunzip. You can use the tar program in Linux to extract a tar.gz file as following:

tar -xvzf yourfile.tar.gz

Here, x = extract, v = verbose, z = gzip, f = force

If the tar file isn’t compressed with gunzip, then you need to exclude the ‘z’ option which would be as following:

tar -xvf yourfile.tar

Why are we using Softlayer Nameservers?

I was reviewing the live chat transcripts earlier today. An interesting one that was served by “Ronskit”, a live chat operator of Mellowhost caught my attention. One of our visitor was interested to know, why are we using Softlayer nameservers for the domain “mellowhost.com” (http://intodns.com/mellowhost.com) instead of ns1.mellowhost.com or so on. The visitor was more interested in proving that Mellowhost is hosted in a shared server and all of our clients are also using a server that is not really managed by Mellowhost. His excuses were flowing towards why we don’t sell VPS or Master Resellers, or so called “Alpha” Master Resellers instead we only sell Reseller and Shared Hosting. It is eventually hard to answer a management level of query by a sales representative and as expected he wasn’t able to please the visitor 🙂 I quickly thought to write this down for future references.

 

Continue reading “Why are we using Softlayer Nameservers?”

2Checkout

As we do not have an offline Credit Card processing option, we were planning to add 2Checkout for long time. We had been seeing many requests from “Africa” and Middle East countries requesting to use 2Checkout. We have finally made 2Checkout available for all types of Payment to Mellowhost services. You can now select 2Checkout from the Payment Option for new orders or paying the recurring bills. 2Checkout can be used for paying with Direct Credit Card.

Happy Hosting!

Some good budget servers!

We use Softlayer and Liquidweb for all of our production servers. None of them is really a budget server provider. Softlayer does sell some budget servers which are not at all good for production servers planned for web hosting services due to their inability to upgrade in future (Like xpress servers). Moreover the price isn’t really right for the same set of hardwares with some other budget provider. We have been using budget servers for our backup servers which usually can hold tons of TBs of data.

Continue reading “Some good budget servers!”

How to protect your WordPress blog from web injection

I have been thinking to write this post for long time, although, couldn’t get time to write details about this major security issue. From my experience, I have seen a big percentage of users are using WordPress and a certain percentage always face some sort of Web Injections (Iframe for example) with any shared hosting provider. This post would go into deep to study why these web injections are occurring and how can you protect your wordpress blog from these sort of issues.

Continue reading “How to protect your WordPress blog from web injection”

First Impression on Windows 7

I have been using my Macbook for all of my work from last year. My desktop had the old windows xp. I was using Livezilla client which has only windows application (We got Providesupport today replacing Livezilla, as it got mac client, should post a new topic on it). This is why I had to use the desktop as a part of business along with my macbook. I was planning to upgrade this box for a long time. Didn’t really have enough time to do so. Yesterday, I went to a Microsoft showroom here, and got a license for Windows 7 Professional. They took 165$ in local currency for the Windows 7 Professional. I was actually hoping for Windows 7 Ultimate, but the pricing for ultimate (215$) was out of my budget. I had upgraded my RAM and Motherboard couple of days ago after a recent crash of my graphics card. I was well aware that my current hardware configuration should sustain Windows 7 Pro.

Installation went smooth. It was pretty faster than Windows XP if I can remember (Last time, I installed windows was in 2007). After using Macbook for last one year, I was continuously losing my interest on windows. Mac OS X Leopard is fast, virus free and most importantly, it doesn’t crash so frequently like my windows did before. I wasn’t really expecting much from Windows 7 over Windows XP. But I have to say, I am pretty much amazed with the performance and design tactics. I find it way faster than XP and in some cases, it would beat my Mac. I was hearing about the hardware acceleration improvement on Internet Explorer 9 and waiting to try it. It really squeezes your net! I tested both IE 9 and FF 4 Beta 6 on my windows 7, and I can definitely feel IE is performing better than FF. Older IE had tremendous problem with the tab opening, but IE 9 has overcome the issue, it looks like. It is opening tabs faster than FF 4. Although, sites are loading fast, but the compatibility seems to be a problem with IE 9. It can not load lots of javascripts and css, so I assume, it has more to improve.

I specially like the design of Task manager in Windows 7. I was using Windows 2008 R2 in one of my windows VPS, and it is pretty similar to that one. Linux is having lots of tools to find the bottlenecks of a system from scratch. I have never seen windows feeling interest for it. There are lots of geeks who would feel to tweak their OS and find the best from it. Although, windows have always been casual to give such tools to end users. This time, I can see windows is feeling the need. They have a Resource Monitor service built in to allow users to track root level usage.

Quick preview system for the tasks seem pretty nice. I can remember in old XP, when I was using the IE 6 and having around 20-25 windows opened, and the task bar was filled with “…”.

They seem to be having lots of improvement in the process management. I tried running couple of injections on svchost and other services, it seems, the current structure simply discards them. Even though, those were working with the latest update of windows xp. I read an article on Windows Server 2008 around a year ago, regarding the process architecture of it, and if I can remember correctly, Windows is more on following the linux architecture day by day. Users permission on process management is becoming more important. I would definitely work with it in later time and post a detailed report for Mellowhost blog readers 🙂

I have spent 6 hours till now with windows 7 professional edition, and I have say, I am impressed. You do need a good configuration to run it, but it is nevertheless a waste anymore. Keep up the good work Microsoft.