We ran into a TON of problems upgrading our ubuntu servers to the latest version of Ubuntu. We suffered everything from Kernel panics, to python issues, to broken upgrades mid-way through. It was a vastly different than the typical upgrade cycle we have been used to.
We are full of quick “tips” this month! We have been doing some automated product system integrations using a third party data feed and a pre-existing Magento install. The C# Sharp calls to Magento’s API work quite well (seemingly a bit slow), but we ran into a brick wall recently. Essentially, while adding images to […]
We had a project where we are using PhPMailer to send emails out from an existing gmail account. While sending emails from a local SMTP server worked like a charm, we kept getting ” AUTH not accepted from server:” errors every time we tried using our gmail accounts. As it turns out, GMAIL always uses […]
We do a lot of work with Amazon’s S3 cloud. With the S3 you can quickly setup a huge chunk of reasonable cost storage and even serve it over a browser. They provide a really long url like “http://WebsiteBuckname.yourdomain.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/”, which is not very aesthetically pleasing. Using CNAMES in your hosted DNS, you can shorten the […]
UPDATE 12/20/2013: We’ve moved a few clients away from the Google Plugin, in favor of the PHP file feeds. The Google Plugin, in our experience has caused a lot of problem and bugs with other plugins and was not consistent (for whatever reason) in reporting the data to Google. Also, we have added an important […]
This was a tip that we just had to share with everyone. Our email tool of choice here at Silva Tech, is Mozilla Thunderbird with the “Ligtning” calendar plugin. Its worked very well with the multitude of Google Calendars/mail accounts that we maintain for clients, but recently the program started to crawl on a regular […]
Filezilla is great tool for any web service provider, but we have on more than one occasion been bit with a rather annoying error that stops our entire transfer process forcing us to close and re-open the tool. You’ll usually get something like: Status: ftpcontrolsocket.cpp(1750): Waiting for replies to skip before sending next command…
To continue our series on WordPress hacks and cleanups, we present a very quick and dirty method of detecting and cleaning up wordpress based pages that may have been infected by the good ol’ Base64 hack. The PERL code listed below recursively searches down the root web folder, searches files for any hints of a […]
Magento’s internal search engine is really really rough around the edges. Its very inflexible and sometimes tedious to populate and maintain. Thankfully, there is a very low-cost option from a vendor that knows a little bit about search engines. Google Site Search! Its easy to install within a Magento installation (and replace the default search […]
Last week we mentioned a few plugins about finding and cleaning hacks. With that same client, we found a new vector of attack that is immune to a lot of the new tactics. In one instance, we found that the code was placed in clear text, rather than obfuscated by base_64 encoding. Basically, the new […]
