One Reminder, One Long Day: Forum Upgrade, File Cleanup, and a Network Card That Vanished It started with a simple reminder: the forum software needed updating. It turned into a full day of server housekeeping. Here's what I ran into and the commands I used. Anything in ALL CAPS is a placeholder, so swap in your own values. Back up before you change anything. 1. The upgrade that always failed The one-click Invision upgrade never worked for me, so I'd been uploading updates by hand. The cause was
When the Website Runs Out of Seats: Diagnosing a Slow Site Like a Sick Diesel Tonight the site went down on me. Anyone who has chased a Cummins that "runs fine, then doesn't" knows the feeling. Everything looked healthy, but something was wrong. How I Caught It: The Dash Gauges I didn't find out because a member emailed me. I found out because of the gauges. I run Linux on my desktop, and I use a little monitoring panel called Conky that sits right on my screen and shows the health of the websit
Fixing Email and Spam on the Server: What We Repaired Today Today was a long maintenance day on the live mopar1973man.com mail server. The main problem was a flood of spam hitting one of my mailboxes. While chasing it I found and fixed several other things, and I'm writing them down in case it helps someone else running their own mail server. 1. Spam filtering wasn't working properly SpamAssassin was tagging most incoming mail with a "URIBL_BLOCKED" warning. That means the server couldn't use th
Invision Community has no built-in way to give each section of a site its own colors. A little custom CSS can do it. Here's how I gave the Titanium and Cloud 10 areas of this site their own look. The idea Every page on an Invision site is tagged with its section and its ID number. A blog page, for example, is tagged as the blog app with the blog's number. Pages that sit inside a section, such as a post or a forum topic, link back to their parent section in the breadcrumb at the top. CSS can look
Cloud 10 Computers is back as the home for servers, networking, Linux and security. Here's the first project: a full security check-up on my own servers. Cloud 10 Computers started in 1994 as my custom PC building business, and it's returning as the home for everything computer-related on this site. The first project was my own backyard. While the site sat untended, I did a full security check-up and cleaned up the servers. In general terms, here's what that meant. Updates The forum software, PH
