Spheron1 -

May 28, 2020

Sendmail on Plesk – user is not allowed to send mail

I recently ran into a strange problem on a Plesk server where one subscription was inexplicably unable to send email using sendmail (which is what the PHP mail() function uses). The following was being logged in /var/logs/maillog for each attempt: plesk sendmail[1628571]: handlers_stderr: ERROR:__main__:Rejecting message: system user uid='<user ID>’ is not allowed to send mailplesk sendmail[1628571]: handlers_stderr: DATA REPLY:554:5.7.0 Your...

General Comments: 0

April 3, 2019

Changing the locale in Ubuntu Server

When logging into any cPanel server via SSH from an Ubuntu jump server I was seeing some strange warnings from Perl which I didn’t see when logging in from my laptop running macOS: perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = “C.UTF-8” are supported and installed on...

cPanel/WHM/Mac OS X/Ubuntu and Debian Comments: 0

September 24, 2018

ProCurve SSH – no matching cipher found

I recently ran into a strange problem where I suddenly couldn’t SSH to any of our HPE ProCurve 2800 series (2824, 2848) devices from either macOS or Linux. I’m still not really sure what started this as OpenSSH definitely hasn’t been updated recently on the Linux client device at the very least, so I don’t see any reason for the...

HP ProCurve Comments: 0

September 17, 2018

OpenLiteSpeed WordPress cache mysteriously not working

The OpenLiteSpeed web server (OLS) and LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP) plugin provide a great way of both speeding up WordPress and handing large numbers of visitors. OLS is an open source derivative of the LiteSpeed Web Server (LSWS), which delivers most many of the key features, including the high performance LiteSpeed Cache (LSCache). Whilst it can’t read Apache configuration files...

LiteSpeed Comments: 0

August 15, 2018

Rspamd, bayes expiry and Redis – ERR Number of keys can’t be greater than number of args

I recently enabled the bayes expiry module (https://rspamd.com/doc/modules/bayes_expiry.html) in Rspamd and found myself staring at the following error in the Rspamd logs with no idea what it meant: lua; bayes_expiry.lua:332: cannot perform expiry step: ERR Number of keys can’t be greater than number of args The only reference that I could find to this online was a single post on...

Spam Comments: 0

August 6, 2018

SQL Server 2008 R2 upgrade and INSTALLSHAREDDIR/INSTALLSHAREDWOWDIR

I recently found myself trying to upgrade an old SQL Server 2008 R2 instance to SP3 so that it could in turn be upgraded to SQL Server 2014, but quickly ran into problems with the following error message: The INSTALLSHAREDWOWDIR command line value is not valid. Please ensure the specified path is valid and different than the INSTALLSHAREDDIR path. At...

Microsoft SQL Server/Windows Comments: 0

July 2, 2018

Decrypting an APFS volume from the Terminal

I’ve been playing about with a Hackintosh desktop running High Sierra, but run into an interesting problem – the FileVault Preboot loader which asks you for the password to decrypt the APFS volume doesn’t recognise the USB keyboard by default. Apparently there are ways to fix this by building the necessary drivers and inserting them into the Preboot volume, but as...

Mac OS X Comments: 0

March 16, 2018

Building Bareos RPMs on Ubuntu 16.04

Following on from my previous post on how to build Bareos (Backup Archiving Recovery Open Sourced) RPM packages on CentOS 6 & 7 (https://www.spheron1.uk/2018/03/14/building-bareos-rpms-on-centos-6-7/), the following instructions will show you how to build .deb versions of the packages on Ubuntu 16.04. Again, these instructions are based on Bareos version 17.2.5, so would need to be adjusted appropriately for other versions...

Bareos and Bacula/Ubuntu and Debian Comments: 0

March 14, 2018

Building Bareos RPMs on CentOS 6 & 7

Bareos (Backup Archiving Recovery Open Sourced) is a popular open source backup system originally forked from the Bacula project, but they only publicly publish packages for the first release of each major version; updates are reserved for paying customers. The source code is available on GitHub however, so you can pretty easily build your own packages, even if exactly how...

Bareos and Bacula/Red Hat and CentOS Comment: 1

September 10, 2016

WHMCS and Nominet EPP farce (again!)

On the 14th of January 2016 Nominet notified EPP users that they would be upgrading their EPP system to require TLS version 1.1 or higher connections on the 8th of June 2016 in order to keep the EPP system secure. From the 2nd of February 2016 the Nominet EPP testbed was updated to reflect these new requirements so that registrars...

Domains and DNS/WHMCS Comments: 0