When configuring a Drupal-Ubercart install on a Plesk based host Ubercart requires the creation of a /keys directory that is outside of your document root (aka /httpdocs in Plesk )  To create a keys directory that does not generate open_basedir errors you’ll need to do the following

Log in as root and create or edit conf/vhost.conf and conf/vhost_ssl.conf as shown.

conf/vhost.conf:

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/httpdocs/>
php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/httpdocs:/tmp:/var/www/vhosts/YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/keys"
</Directory>


conf/vhost_ssl.conf:

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/httpdocs/>
php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/httpdocs:/tmp:/var/www/vhosts/YOUR-DOMAIN-HERE.COM/keys"
</Directory>

Note that Php_admin_value and all that follows should be on one line.

Then run (on CentOS – Ubuntu/Debian may be slightly different):

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -u --vhost-name=<domainname>

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

After the restart Plesk will include the contents of your file in the apache config file. You can verify that it’s being included by checking httpd.include you should see a line similiar to:

Include /var/www/vhosts/mydomain.com/conf/vhost.conf

Feeling adventurous and want to add other apache directives in the .conf file ?   Great, but HEED MY WARNING.  If you mess up the syntax in either of the files apache may fail to restart — That would be why you needed to log in as root.   Delete-Remove-Rename the .conf files, rerun websrvmng and start apache.  No big deal if you’re on a development box, but, as always you would be wise to follow the 2-Beer rule when logging into production boxes as root.

Resources:

Ubercart Keys Documentation Page:
http://www.ubercart.org/docs/user/2731/credit_card_settings

Plesk forum and Knowledgebase posts:
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=84211&highlight=vhost.conf+websrvmng
http://kb.parallels.com/en/5464
http://kb.parallels.com/en/432

You may want to check out Power Toys for Plesk from grafxsoftware.com http://www.grafxsoftware.com/product.php?id=172 which includes a vhost conf editing tool.

Of course you can avoid all this by having Aisle8, Inc. host your Drupal, Ubercart or OpenAtrium site.  We can host it on a Plesk based server, or one of our trusty Aegir based boxes.  Aegir eases the hosting and upgrading Drupal sites —   Ain’t nothing else like it around.

"john.doe 333-444-5555"@myvoicemailsystem.com

so I needed to whitelist the entire domain.

While gmail doesn’t have a specific “whitelist” feature, turns out this is pretty easily accomplished with “filters”. Here’s how:

1. Log into gmail, click ’settings’
2. Click ‘Filters’
3. Click ‘Create a New Filter’
4. In the “From” field enter the domain you want to whitelist, ie. ’somedomain.com’
5. Click ‘Next Step’, then tick the ‘Never send it to Spam’ box.
6. Click ‘Create Filter’ and your done.

That wasn’t so bad. Anything sent from ’somedomain.com’ now show up in your inbox rather than disappearing onto the great SPAM abyss.

You’ll need to be logged in as root.

First, Get into MySQL and use the Plesk database, “psa”:

mysql -u admin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow`;
use psa;


Query 1: List all the standard hosted domains, send the results to a csv file:

select name from domains where htype='vrt_hst' INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/domains.csv';


Query 2: Building on that, lets add client information and sort it to make it pretty:

select cname,name from domains, clients where cl_id = clients.id and htype='vrt_hst' order by cname,name INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/domains-client.csv';


Nothing earth shattering here, but it might save you 5 minutes.

Gmail Down - 502 error message

Well, it looks like I really can’t blame this on a flaky WIFI connection at the coffee shop. Gmail is returning a 502 error. In other words, gmail is down. Looks like I’m not the only one. There’s some chatter HERE on google groups.

So, what exactly causes a 502 error?  The folks at checkupdown.com have a nice explanation here.  They suggest cleaning out your browser cache, but it looks like this is beyond that.  We’ve tried from an ISP in NY and one in the Midwest.  If you’re not logged in to your account it will authenticate you.  The error occurs after authentication.  Curious.

Update – Looks like they’ve excercised their demons (or restarted their daemons).  After almost an hour gmail is back.

The British spelling of “favourite” might indicate that OpenBlueDragon has made a jump across the pond and may be on it’s way to world dominance, so I decided to see if indeed I could be up and running in minutes. I was.

I’m familiar with WAR files, VMWare images and setting up Amazon EC2 virtual machines with ElasticFox, but I’d never even heard of JETTY. After a few minutes of Google to resolve fears that JETTY would somehow destroy my local Apache install I dove in.

It couldn’t have been easier. Basically you unzip the file, type in a run command at the command prompt and your up and running. Take a look at the screencast below and dive in.

Next up: Drive Mappings and Data Sources.

For the last eight years I’ve built three companies and made a good living developing coldfusion applications. We’ve all watched as the product and our destiny passed from Allaire to Macromedia to Adobe. ColdFusion books bloomed on the shelves of Borders and Barnes and Noble only to disappear into Amazon. I’ve cycled through Ruby and PHP and loathed .Net and at the end of the day, I can *STILL* get more out the door with CFML than I can with anything else. Now we can finally take the bull by the horns.

There are, of course other Non-Adobe CFML projects, but OpenBlueDragon seems to have what it takes to carry the day. We’ve been waiting for this for some time, and are planning to port our condoEngine application from Win2k / IIS / CFMX 6.1 / SqlServer setup to Linux / OpenBlueDragon / MySql, or Firebird… We plan to document our little adventure on this blog.

We’re also working on getting OpenBlueDragon working on or Parrallels – Plesk based hosting platforms. Plesk currently has both ColdFusion and Tomcat integrated into the control panel. There are a lot of small hosting companies – and some large ones – using Plesk. Getting OpenBlueDragon running on Plesk servers may help introduce many new users to the project.

We’ll keep posting…