After upgrading my Plesk install past 8.1.1, I encountered a problem with the builtin backup utility. When attempting to create a new backup (either locally or to an FTP repository), I would almost instantly be handed back the error:
Unable to create backup session: Specified file is not accessible
I googled around and found a couple of results, including a support forum that actually had the answer to my problem burried back on the second page.
For whatever reason, Plesk loses the ability to write to its temporary directory, where all backups are held until they are completed (even for FTP destinations). I was easily able to solve this problem by (as root):
chown -R psaadm:psaadm /var/lib/psa/dumps
Note that the original author of the suggestion I used said to chmod 777 the files, but this proved to be unnecessary. I saw that the parent directory was owned by psaadm, and it just made sense that the dumps directory would need to be as well.
In any case, it worked for me. Hope this helps someone…
I found Can you tell 128kbps AAC from the original? Take the test! via Digg quite fascinating today.
Since the iTunes Music Store opened, a lot of people have complained about the DRM-infested low-quality music they sold. I’ve often countered that the vast majority of users couldn’t tell one level of high-quality music from another.
Finally, it looks like this simple experiment has proven my point. If you look at the stats, on roughly every track about half of the people were wrong when they tried to pick the lower-quality and the original tracks apart. If you further take into account that there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll simply guess correctly every time, that means that in fact a huge majority of people don’t have a clue which track is the original - we’ll conservatively say 75% of the overall tested population.
Have you taken the Apple Challenge? Blindfold your ears and see if you can tell the difference between the encoding…
By the way, the site withstood the Digg effect by hosting their audio files on Amazon’s S3 service. Very cool!
Missing an Email? It may be Media Temple’s Fault
It started last week when I was trying to sign up for Ron Paul Christmas. For some peculiar reason, I didn’t receive the welcome email. After talking with the site owner, it turned out (mt) was rejecting the email because the email address wordpress@ronpaulchristmas.com didn’t exist on the sending server.
Now, this isn’t particularly unusual. There is no requirement1 that an email address actually exist for a server to send email as if it were from that address. This is especially true from Wordpress blogs, which often send email from
wordpress@domain.comaccounts on behalf of their owners. Now, since this is only used for outgoing email, in most cases users would never bother setting the email account up. Why would you? You’re never going to be receiving email there2, so what’s the point?Well, (mt) apparently knows better than you do… For “security reasons”3, their grid service does a “callback” check on every incoming email address. If the server handling mail for
domain.comdoesn’t recognize that account (such as ourwordpress@domain.comexample), (mt)’s server will reject the message.I’ve tried to point out that this kind of behavior can be detrimental, particularly in the age of blogging and web services we now exist in, but the best answer I’ve been able to get out of (mt) is that I should add the sending address to their Mail Protect whitelist. Well great, unless I can add
*@*to the whitelist, or at the very leastwordpress@*, that’s hardly a viable solution - how do I know the address that’s sending to me if I never get the email?If you use Media Temple’s grid service4, please contact (mt) immediately and tell them this is an unacceptable situation. I love a lot of aspects of their grid service, but this is clearly not one of them…