Mar 29 2011

New Libera site

After many months of preparation, and tons of coordination over the past few weeks, the new Libera site has gone live! Thank you to Ian at colesi for the beautiful design implementation, Andy for liaising between Ian, the rest of the Libera crew, and me, and to all others that had a hand in this amazing new look! The first server has been launched in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States. As soon as finances allow, I will be placing another server in London, UK (or Amsterdam, Netherlands depending on choices of carrier hotels) followed by possibles in Kyoto, Japan, and Sydney, Australia. My hope is to geolocate DNS so that everyone around the globe will have as quick and efficient of a connection to the site as possible.

Please check out the new site, and drop me a line if you have questions, comments, or concerns:

www.libera.org.uk

|:| Zach |:|

Dec 20 2010

New babies!

Today is an exciting day! I just received an email from my cousin Tony telling me that his twin baby girls were born late Saturday night (18 December 2010). I am so happy for you, and a very warm welcome to Brooke and Chloe.

|:| Zach |:|

Dec 04 2010

phpBB problem with any call to PHP’s mail function

After fighting for a while to figure out why a phpBB installation (migrated to my new server) wouldn’t send out email notifications, and digging through non-existent logs, I have figured out the problem. When a new registration would come through, or when a user would get a new private message, no email notification would be sent out. In the phpBB error log (in ACP), the only error listed was:

E-mail error
ยป EMAIL/PHP/mail()
/forums/ucp.php

In order to troubleshoot whether it was a phpBB problem or PHP mail() problem, I used this little mailer script:

<?php
$to = “myemail@domain.com”;
$subject = “Test”;
$message = “Test of PHP mail function.”;
$from = “myemail2@domain.com”;
$headers = “From: $from”;
mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers);
echo “Mail Sent.”;
?>

Low and behold, that email failed. What was the problem in my case? Well, in my php.ini (for Apache, not CLI), the following was listed for sendmail:

/usr/sbin/sendmail

and that is the correct path for my Gentoo server. However, I needed to add the -t option to it:

/usr/sbin/sendmail -t

The -t option “Read[s] message for recipients. To:, Cc:, and Bcc: lines will be scanned for recipient addresses. The Bcc: line will be deleted before transmission.”

After that option was added, I restarted Apache and everything worked nicely.

Hope that helps anyone in the same situation.

Cheers,
Zach