Joel Mama’s Blog

Found another great example of the reason I started this blog. I was experiencing IMAP connection caching errors in Thunderbird. So I googled “plesk imap connections” and boo-ya there was the fix as the first result. Thank you Google, the internet, and kind Samaritans!

BTW, here’s the fix for increasing Plesk‘s default Courier-IMAP connections. I was receiving the following error in Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 on XP:

Unable to connect to your IMAP server. You may have exceeded the maximum number of connections to this server. If so, use the Advanced IMAP Server Settings dialog to reduce the number of cached connections.

Platform: Plesk 7.5.4 Reloaded, CentOS 4

If you need to make changes to Apache’s httpd.include file on Plesk, your changes will get overwritten. This was driving me mad as I needed to make changes globally, not just on a per-domain vhost.conf basis as is recommended by Plesk. I sent an email to the support department of my hoster, Knownhost, asking where the “raw version” of the httpd.include file was — meaning where was the data for which Plesk was overwritting my changes? My logic was that if I could find where Plesk was pulling this data to overwrite httpd.include, I could modify it to my liking. Andrew from Knownhost told me that the data that overwrites the Plesk config files is hardcoded into the websrvmng binary (this is a utility Plesk uses). Also, Plesk data is strewn about in various databases. Ugh! But, he did offer insight into how to get what I wanted.

The trick is to put your changes in the httpd.conf file which will take precedence over httpd.include (be sure to put it before the httpd.include directive). Well, that was simple. Thanks Andrew and Knownhost!

NOTE: I wrote this post months ago and forgot to post it. In that time I’ve upgraded to Plesk 8.0.1 and I’m really liking it. The above information still applies to Plesk 8, except they’ve moved and renamed httpd.include. No matter, as that file will just be overwritten anyway.

My wife is a middle school teacher. She teaches drama and journalism. Yeah, those go together well I help her with the school paper layout as I used to do it at the weekly college paper with Chad and Brad. Last night around midnight I finished the final layout tweaks (don’t get me started about PM 6.5 and files from Illustrator!). When attempting to print to a PostScript file for later distilling into a PDF on my other computer, I received the following error:

“An error occurred while printing.
General printer failure.
8315:5218″

After trying many different things I believe the issue is a file permission issue. My setup is like this:

• Two computers: My WinXP, and my wife’s Win2k
• Her computer serves as “home base” in that all files are stored there in a shared folder and I work with them over the network. She works with them locally (duh).
• PageMaker 6.52
• Adobe Universal PostScript Windows Driver 1.0.6, printing to “FILE:”

When you print to a file in PM, you can’t really choose where it is saved. It will always be saved next to the .P65 file you’re working with. With that said, I was trying to print to a .PS file across the network where the file was stored. PM didn’t like that. I tried sitting at my wife’s computer and printing the .PS file from the same (but now local) location. Strangely enough PM didn’t like that either. I think the permissions I have on that network share just aren’t jiving with PM. Finally, I moved the .P65 and all supporting files out of the shared folder and into a totally “normal” local file with standard permissions like C:\temp\ . That did it. My print to file worked!

When using Toggle Software‘s ToggleMINIMIZE with Mozilla Firefox and/or Mozilla Thunderbird, you may find that it’s not minimizing to the tray as it should. You need to set a preference in the Moz apps before it will work.

I totally stumbled upon this by accident. I was investigating Firefoxes’ atrocious memory handling and how to deal with it. I found the config.trim_on_minimize Mozilla preference (FYI, I’m still evaluating this to see if I like what it does). After restarting FF and TB, they started minimizing to the tray all of a sudden! To verify that config.trim_on_minimize was the fix, I removed that pref, restarted and tried to minimize to the tray. It didn’t work. So, there’s your fix for that, found on a fluke.

See Mr. Tiensivu’s blog for more info on the Mozilla preference.

I recently updated my internet connection to a screaming 8 mbit cable connection. This is up from my 1.5 mbit DSL connection. The downside is that I now need to frequently change my underwear when I download something at 1000 KB/second. I’m now a Concast customer instead of a Qworst customer. A lateral move IMO! But I digress…

I had a WRT54G running Sveasoft’s Alchemy doing most of the gateway-type stuff. I wasn’t even using the wireless. When I got the new cable modem connected, I hooked my laptop directly into it. From there, I had a great 8 mbit connection. Ok, off to a good start. But once I plugged the new cable modem into my network setup (with the WRT54G in between me and the internet), things got slow. What’s up?

Skip to the end where I decide to try out a different firmware. I’ve never liked using Sveasoft due to the author’s dick-head attitude and GPL violations. I’ll let you google for that story on your own. Anyway, I thought I’d try HyperWRT. It appears to me that the standard HyperWRT project is a bit stagnant. However, another fellow picked up the code and has been improving it and releasing it as “HyperWRT Thibor” which is what I installed. Once I did that, *poof* I got my 8 mbit speed back! And as a nice side-effect, I’m not running Sveasoft anymore

To give a little more information, I believe the issue was Alchemy’s QoS handling. I have to run QoS because I have two separate VoIP routers (Vonage RT31P2 & RTP300) that need priority. I tested this theory by disabling QoS in Alchemy and my speed increased. I also tried setting the max up/download speeds on the QoS screen and no matter what I entered I always maxed out around 5 mbit. Again, HyperWRT Thibor does not have that issue.

My details:

• WRT54G v4
• Alchemy 1.0
• HyperWRT G Thibor14