The utility is actually written in PERL so it can run on any number of hosts that support PERL scripting, and while it has many config options, here is the actual command we used to transfer an email account from our server to Google Apps Mail account(GMail is the same) from a Linux box:

The command

imapsync \

–host1 thinkovi.com –user1 email@thinkovi.com –password1 mypass1 \

–host2 imap.gmail.com –user2 new@gmail.com –password2 pass2 \

–ssl2 –ssl1 –authmech1 PLAIN –authmech2 LOGIN

• bear in mind that this utility will work only for email servers supporting IMAP protocol.

• also, in the above code notice we have used SSL for both connections, and PLAIN authentication for the original server and LOGIN for the imap server at google

Result Message

++++ End looping on each folder ++++
++++ Statistics ++++
Time                   : 257 sec
Messages transferred   : 170
Messages skipped       : 0
Total bytes transferred: 12914745
Total bytes skipped    : 0
Total bytes error      : 0
Detected 0 errors

• worth mentioning, the utility really worked and our gmail account contained in the end all email messages and folders from the original IMAP server

The full usage options(“imapsync –help“) and more information can also be found on the imapsync linux man page here.

Please, thank the author (Gilles LAMIRAL) by giving him a book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/1C9UNDIH3P7R7/

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)subpage1/subpage2/mypage.html$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Itemid=91&page=mypage$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mynewurl.com/index.php?mypage=new

What the above condition does is redirect /subpage1/subpage2/mypage.html?Itemid=91&page=mypage url to http://mynewurl.com/index.php?mypage=new

Obviously, you need to replace the above names with your actual site names

The second RewriteCond with QUERY_STRING is only needed if the url you want to rewrite has additional parameters like mypage.html?pages=mypage for instance

Data recovery

As you might know, disk drives, specially in high usage areas like hosting enviroments, have a tendency of crashing from time to time.

Most crashes you will encounter are related to bad blocks on your hard drive which in some cases will stop your operating system from booting, leaving your server at a stop. There are several utilities which can help you detect and fix the bad blocks at a software level, like the FSCK(file system check) available for Linux, or CHKDSK and SCANDISK for Windows, however there are situations when the bad block can’t be fixed, most of the cases due to a critical error.

While this doesn’t happen constantly or too often, it would be nice to think that there might be ways to recover data that might be business critical, and here is how:

DDRescue is recovery tool that will help you create an image of your hard drive, skip the bad blocks, and restore it on another hard disk! It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors. While this utility mostly runs on unix systems, it can deal with any type of disk drive data, whether it’s a linux system, windows, mac osx or something else.

We found this article to be fairly instructive giving all the restore procedures to handle a hard disk failure recovery.

If you are lucky, and the bad blocks were not containing some important booting data, your new cloned hard drive could be popped inside the server and ready to boot from it, resuming your server activity! If not, well you are still lucky you just need to do some more work to get the server up and booting again, fairly a system administrator job.

There are also hardware failures, when your hard disk might become unaccessible at a hardware level, in which case the best way to do is ship it back to the manufacturer company and let them replace the faulty parts, your important data might still get saved.

Best and always, make sure you always keep proper backups of your important data. Good luck!

DDRescue help: ddrescue -h

GNU ddrescue - Data recovery tool.
Copies data from one file or block device to another,
trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors.

Usage: ddrescue [options] infile outfile [logfile]
You should use a logfile unless you know what you are doing.

Options:
  -h, --help                    display this help and exit
  -V, --version                 output version information and exit
  -b, --block-size=      sector size of input device [default 512]
  -B, --binary-prefixes         show binary multipliers in numbers [SI]
  -c, --cluster-size=  sectors to copy at a time [128]
  -C, --complete-only           do not read new data beyond logfile limits
  -d, --direct                  use direct disc access for input file
  -D, --synchronous             use synchronous writes for output file
  -e, --max-errors=          maximum number of error areas allowed
  -F, --fill=            fill given type blocks with infile data (?*/-+)
  -g, --generate-logfile        generate approximate logfile from partial copy
  -i, --input-position=
    starting position in input file [0]
  -m, --domain-logfile=   restrict domain to finished blocks in file
  -n, --no-split                do not try to split or retry failed blocks
  -o, --output-position=
   starting position in output file [ipos]
  -q, --quiet                   suppress all messages
  -r, --max-retries=         exit after given retries (-1=infinity) [0]
  -R, --retrim                  mark all failed blocks as non-trimmed
  -s, --max-size=        maximum size of input data to be copied
  -S, --sparse                  use sparse writes for output file
  -t, --truncate                truncate output file to zero size
  -T, --try-again               mark non-split, non-trimmed blocks as non-tried
  -v, --verbose                 verbose operation
Numbers may be followed by a multiplier: b = blocks, k = kB = 10^3 = 1000,
Ki = KiB = 2^10 = 1024, M = 10^6, Mi = 2^20, G = 10^9, Gi = 2^30, etc...

SquirrelMail Logo

I have to admit, the gmail and yahoo new email interfaces are great, if you don’t mind the advertising, and very easy to use, however i have been using for a long time SquirrelMail to access the email directly on my server!

While the interface that comes with the cpanel installation is very basic, there is one thing i would have liked to have, like in Yahoo, when you get an email, the page title automatically changes with the number of unread emails!

Now, squirrelmail already have this auto-refresh thing, so here is what you need to do in order to get the titles of the top frame updated:

1. locate and open on your server the squirrelmail/src/left_main.php file
2. locate this line

/* Print unseen information. */
if ($unseen_string != '') {

3. Add this code just before the if statement

if($mailbox == 'INBOX'){
   if ($unseen_string != ""){
      $line .= "<script type='text/javascript'>top.document.title='Inbox ".$unseen_string."'</script>";
   }else{
      $line .= "<script type='text/javascript'>top.document.title='No unread messages'</script>";
   }
}

Now, your squirellmail should look like this when getting a new email

And obviously, this will only work for the INBOX folder!

Happy squirrelling

Microsoft Web Platform

It seems that, earlier this year, Microsoft released a small application called Web Platform Installer , a utility meant to be dead simple to install a range of web applications and get your website up and going fast on a IIS server.

Beside the usual Microsoft web applications support like ASP.NET and SQL SERVER, they also added support for PHP, facilitating this way the installation of a range of web publishing tools like Drupal, Moodle and Wordpress, hope I see some Joomla! there as it’s fairly popular.

Would also be nice to hear they also added support for Python, so that we can start serving code to Google, kidding , but it wouldbe nice.

A small review of this service can be found here , thanks to Louis Simoneau.

File encryption

Lets say those files contain some important data(ex. your credit card database data) and you are a little paranoid when thinking about unsecured network connections.

In case you are running Linux, you are in luck, the Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) is an free encryption tool that can encrypt or sign your files/archives with a password or an access key.

Basic usage

• open up a ssh terminal console

• Encryption command:

gpg -c <file_name>

- this will create a new file called <file_name>.gpg which is your encoded file

• Decryption command:

gpg <file_name>.gpg

The full online usage manual of the gpg command can be found on The GNU Privacy Guard Handbook webpage.

Good luck:)

• What might be good for someone with lets say a simple html website, might not be really that good for you, since you would need more resources when running a database driven application for instance, make sure their infrastructure deliver

• Before getting a shared hosting account, ask about the hosting account limitations, like memory usage, mysql maximum number of queries per hour, file write size limit in case you plan to take backups of your site

• Before getting your site moved or created at a new hosting company, do not go on and buy yourself a one year contract, but instead try them for one month, it might save you some good money

• Read everything on their site, policy, term of business, infrastructure, find out why they offer that small price? Is it because they can afford that because they have a large clustered facility or is it because they simply don’t care how slow their clients sites work because servers are overloaded?

• Read everything you find about them on other sites, ask about them in a hosting forum, do a google search

• Or maybe you are ready to manage your own dedicated server? A hosting company with a good support response will be most indicated since they will deal directly with your server, and ideally, in a small amount of time.  Before getting a server, try and contact them through various channels(phone, email, fax) at different periods of the day and test that they really are online as they advertise.

These are only some guidelines we have build for ourself through experince, in the end, everybody is free to choose their hosting company based on their own judgement

Good luck!

While I do not have the details of their current relation, I’m inclined to say that his employee done this with specific actions in mind.

Needless to say, getting backdoor code is like finding needles in a haystack.

You would think by now, ok, why not recover the data from backups? Well that would be ideal, but here is what actually happen:

His hosting company were in charge of  creating backups of his server, however what they actually forgot to specify their client is that those backups are in fact disaster recovery backups and will not protect him for malicious actions, so they setup a daily and weekly backup process, the daily one would refresh itself each day, and the weekly one, each week on Monday as you might guess!

Well, over the weekend, his employee was busy, he managed to delete the database data. Now, the actual business owner gets back to the office on Monday and gets the surprise, a lot of sites have been compromised! Ok, no worries, we have backups, but wait, it’s Monday the backup process just flushed the weekly backup and the old ones are gone, leaving … nothing in place!

The story might have a happy end as we kept the clients data after the initial move, so we are able to recover them from there, however any updates in the meantime might be lost!

There are a lot of things each of us can learn from this story:

• always make sure you keep proper backups of your websites and are able to recover
• taking a day off to test recovery scenarios will help
• try to always keep an ethical point of view and make sure you employee the right people
• and again, always keep a backup, specially when you dealing with impotant data
• nobody cares more about your site than you, so don’t take for granted everything, do a checkup yourself

Getting the law on your side, will help…, but it might be to late!

Please check our Website migration detailed service description, and send us an Inquiry, we will try to respond as soon as possible.

We can also migrate entire servers or applications to new hosting environments, please check our dedicated Server Migration service description.