LinuxHostingSupport

Sometimes you see the following error at the middle of your Webmail Horde session :

Your Internet Address has changed since the beginning of your Mail 

session. To protect your security, you must login again.

This error mostly occurs when the ISP is using proxy servers to filter the browsers content. The proxy server randomly change its IP address and thus cause you to fail the web mail security measures.

The solution is to turn off the ‘checkip’ parameter in the Horde’s configuration file.  The configuration file is located as follows:

cPanel server : /usr/local/cpanel/base/horde/config/conf.php
Plesk server  : /usr/share/psa-horde/config/conf.php

Edit the respective configuration file depending on the control panel you have and look for

$conf['auth']['checkip'] = true;

replace it with

$conf['auth']['checkip'] = false;

This is it. Please note, this is a server wide change and cannot be done on user basis.

When you try to install a package using apt-get, APT searches it’s own database for the package name, if the package is available in the database, then it looks for the repository from where to download the package. It then download the package from that repository and installs it.

If the package name does not exist in APT’s database, it does not have any idea what you are trying to install and you see the following error message:

#  apt-get install <packagename>
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Package aptitude is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package <packagename> has no installation candidate

So, the above error occurs for 2 reasons:

1) The APT’s database is not updated.

A quick fix is to update the APT’s database as per the defined sources list.

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade
# apt-get install <packagename>

This is it. If isn’t fixed, check point #2 below.

2) The package itself isn’t available on the official Ubuntu repository.

In such a situation, you have to add a 3rd party repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list file and install the package, however, try such repositories at your own risk.

The Postfix mail logs may indicate the following error when emails are not working:

postdrop: warning: unable to look up public/pickup: 

No such file or directory

It turns out to be sendmail running along with Postfix and creating issues. The fix is to stop/remove sendmail and create the necessary postfix directory and restart the postfix service.

# /etc/init.d/sendmail stop 
#  mkfifo /var/spool/postfix/public/pickup
# /etc/init.d/postfix restart

The alternative / equivalent of chkconfig in Ubuntu is “sysv-rc-conf”. To install sysv-rc-conf, ssh to the server and execute:

# apt-get install sysv-rc-conf

to start managing the services, execute

# sysv-rc-conf

It’s an easy to use interface for managing /etc/rc{runlevel}.d/ symlinks.
sysv-rc-conf provides a graphical view for turning services on and off at startup.

The steps to install the PHP ‘Fileinfo’ module on a Linux server is as below:

1) Download and untar the package

# wget http://pecl.php.net/get/Fileinfo-1.0.4.tgz
# tar -zxf Fileinfo-1.0.4.tgz
# cd Fileinfo-1.0.4

2) Generate the extension for compiling

# phpize

3) Configure the module

# ./configure

4) generate the install files and install it

# make 

# make install

5) Now the extension will be available under the /usr/lib64/php/modules directory. You now need to add the extension somewhere in the php configuration file.

Edit /etc/php.ini and add the following:

extension=fileinfo.so

6) Save the file and restart the webserver

# service httpd restart

To verify fileinfo module is enabled properly, execute:

# php -i | grep fileinfo
fileinfo support => enabled

Alternate method

Just an FYI, the module can also be installed using the PECL command i.e.

# pecl install fileinfo

Once done, just follow steps 5 and 6 mentioned above to enable it. That’s it.