Posts Tagged ‘company’

How a Ponzi Scheme works – Ponzi the most famous fraudulent network

Monday, March 4th, 2013

Classic_Ponzi_Scheme_ad_650

Those who are living in ex-communist countries who have been through the so called "Perestroika" – Pre-structuring of economy and in the so called privatization process which is selling factories, land and whateve in a country to a private sector business investors have already experienced the so called "Pyramidal" structure businesses which at the end collapse and left after itself a tens of thousands of cheated "investors" without their capital money. In my homeland Bulgaria, during this pre-structuring which in practice was "destructioning" there was thousands of companies for a very long period of time who somehow used this pyramidal structures to steal people investments which already melted in times because of the severe inflation that invaded the country. Near my city in Dobrich. There was a company called Yugoagent started by a "serbian Pharaoh – a charlatan CEO" whose company was promising extraordinary profit interest for people who invested money in Yugoagent as well as big reduction of prices of all investors to purchase "white technigue" home equipment from Yugoagent stores. What happened was maybe between 10 000 to 30 000 of people because "investors" to Yugoagent led only by the blind faith and personal desire to earn. The interest offered by Yugoagent was more than 10% to money put in, I believe he was offering 30% of interest or so and people easily get into the trap of his pre-determined to collapse company. What happened after was Mirolub Gaich's company survived for few years while some of the "investors" ripped benefits, where the multitude just lost their money because of epochal bankruptcy of YUGOAGENT.… I know even some of my relatives has been fooled into the obvious fraudulent business, because our society in Bulgaria lived in communism and was not prepared to face the sad reality of money only centered economy – the so loudly proclaimed as "just" democracy.

Today there are plenty of companies around the world still opened and operated under the same fraudulent model leaving after their bankruptcy their makers with millions in banks smartly stolen and claimed as company losses right before the collosal company collapse. A friend of mine Zlati, took the time to invest some time to research more into how this fraudulent Scheme works and found some references to wikipedia which explains the Scheme in details. Thus I also red a bit and thought my dear readers might be interested to know also how the scheme works. I believe it is a must for anyone who has the intention to be in business. It is good to know to escape the trap, cause even in Pro and High profit businesses there are companies operating under the same hood. Today there are plenty of online based companies today who are somehow involved into Offshore business or even do some kind of money laundry frauds, while offering beneficial investments in a booming companies. It is useful for even ordinary people to get to know the fraudulent scheme to escape from it. With the worsening crisis, the fraudulent activities and companies that does some kind of fraud to make profit increased dramatically and thus the old but well known fraudulent model is blooming.


 

How Ponzi scheme works explained in 5 minutes

To know a bit more about the Ponzi scheme as well as the so called "Pyramid" based fraudulent business check in Wikipedia Ponzi scheme

For those lazy to read in Wikipedia, here is extract from it explaining the Ponzi fraudulent Scheme in short

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation.
The Ponzi scheme usually entices new investors by offering higher returns than other investments, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. Perpetuation of the high returns requires an ever-increasing flow of money from new investors to keep the scheme going The system is destined to collapse because the earnings, if any, are less than the payments to investors. Usually, the scheme is interrupted by legal authorities before it collapses because a Ponzi scheme is suspected or because the promoter is selling unregistered securities. As more investors become involved, the likelihood of the scheme coming to the attention of authorities increases. The scheme is named after Charles Ponzi, who became notorious for using the technique in 1920.
Ponzi did not invent the scheme (for example, Charles Dickens' 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit and 1857 novel Little Dorrit each described such a scheme),[ but his operation took in so much money that it was the first to become known throughout the United States. Ponzi's original scheme was based on the arbitrage of international reply coupons for postage stamps; however, he soon diverted investors' money to make payments to earlier investors and himself.

Constipation God’s punishment for our gluttony – My thoughts on Spiritual Reason for Constipation

Thursday, November 29th, 2012

Constipation God punishment for our gluttony, God's judgement on man
Some people might argue me but recently and over the last years, I had thoughts over the  so common nowadays problem of constipation. I think constipation  is God judgement on our increasingly gluttony self-love instead love for others, ungodliness  and our multiple sins.

I'm deriving this conclusion from my personal experience with constipation, every-time I over ate forced by my gluttony (partially forced by the over filling from everywhere with marketing to eat),  I get constipated. Constipation is one of the worst experience one can get and probably there is no person on earth who didn't experienced this in a stage of his earthly life. Probably half of the world is suffering from this terrible problem at least few times a year, where the frequency of constipation around people tends to be increasing with every consequential year.
Most of people from western world countries are in a number of times suffering more compared to less developed countries.

Main reason for increased constipation percentage in the western world (in my view) is the bad quality of half-artificually produced vegetables and fruits. Many of which grows as you should know grows in laboratories like places in order to do a cost saving for the companies. Due to the marketing hype and fuzz that took over westerners, many as a trick use the "green product" labeling just to make you convince their product, where in reality the product is far from green.

I think, God allowed the poisons which we hold in our hearts to materialize in our food as a punishment for our lack of repentance.

The hyper consumption that is ruling over western europe model is trying to spread itself in the less developed countries as well, while maybe a  billion of peoples all around the world are on the edge to die from hunger. In the west all businesses are trying to restructure themselves to more green friendly / (more green), whether parallel with that the same 'environment concerned businesses' are stimulating people to over consume through their marketing departments. Tell me isn't that one huge hypocrisy? How comes on one place a company talks about any efficiency if its fruits are inefficiency (over consumption)?

In the past days people consumed much less than today and less varied foods, still most of them were more heatlthy and many of them lived to an older age compared to know (this is a fact that one can learn not from the fake company statistics on the internet  trying to all the time show that the age barrier is increasing, this can be learned from our grandmothers and grandfathers and a bit of staring into history).

"Seed Companies" like Monsanto are already dominating the markets and killing the little farmers, so every next day, less and less of original God blessed plant seeds is left on earth. And even those who still are trying to be individual middle and little farmers are forced to buy already a genetically or hybrid modified seeds so a lot of the grown vegetables or fruits  is not grown through God blessed and given original food fondamential but some kind of 'human laboratory altered' plants. Most people and companies doesn't care if the seed is blessed or not by God or what kind of seed or food it is due to the fact they have long ago rejected God and do operate all their life with no God in their mind, but with the only goal for more and more pleasure and self-fulfillment of interests. It is sad really our bodies are constipated but it all starts from our soul constipation, we don't develop our souls in God's knowledge of good but advance instead in the "constipation" of  evil.

But constipation is not so bad in reality and it can be seen as a blessing from God as all pain makes us re-think over life and our deeds. Thus I believe though many might argue me, Constipation is just another of God's innumerous mercies over man to turn us to repentance and prayer.

But I think still there hope as long as each of us tries to be good or develop for good and pray to God, I believe all can be changed our soul and body constipation can be removed through God's power and mercy – only we have to strive for it ….

 

Love is the only true motivator for us as humans and for company personnel

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

love-only-true-motivator

During my succesfully failed studies 🙂 in Arnhem Business School (ABS). I've thought a lot on what really is the greatest motivator for human personnel

My conclusion after probably two years of observing myself and the surrounding environment is that the only true motivator that could be for everyone on this world is Love.
This kind of idea came to me as I've noticed that, I'm only fully truly happy when I do something I love to do!

Probably anyone who is observing himself and has a strive for truth in himself has figured that out too. But I think online there are not too many materials talking about Love as beeing the only true motivator and hence I decided to drop this few lines here.

The conclusion I came up with that Love is the Ultimate Motivator was not only my idea.

This we read in the Holy Bible too. I will quote here the whole John Chapter 4 – King James Version because what it says is an Ultimate Un-changable Truth known for centuries and soneone who really thinks with his mind and looks for true science could get some faith and wisdom on being motivated by this same Love:
 

King James Version: 1 John Chapter 4
1 Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
2 Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God:
3 And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.
4 Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.
5 They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them.
6 We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error. 7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. 10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
12 No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
13 Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit.
14 And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.
15 Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God.
16 And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.
17 Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world.
18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.
19 We love him, because he first loved us.
20 If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?
21 And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.

Again I will repeat the exact phrasing which supports my claim that Love is the Only true Humans and Human employees Motivator :

KJV Verse 16: And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.

It is said so simple so anyone can understand it God is Love and since God can be the only motive for what we do, by doing what we do "living by the law of love" so to say, we can only be life filled happy and productive by doing everything moved by Love with Love for Love (From God, through God, for God)!

Even for unbelievers (atheists) or some other non-Christian religion faiths belonging people this ancient text exposes a very deep truth, which by the way most of the most notable people of all times people has put in their lives mindfully or unmindfully already.

My rationalization continued like so:

If Love is the only true human, and human as a work unit (resource) motivator and we know God is Love himself, then what do you think would a person need to be motivated to love what he does??

Love is like a big firewood which makes fire stronger and stronger the more fuel (Love) you put inside. Therefore my personal belief is to motivate anyone to do anything constructive, we can only do it through Love too.

Everything out of the boundary of Love is ever doomed to fail, it is how God designed us and the universe to work in very beginning ( we can read in the holy bible Genesis chpt).

I'm pretty sure even non-Christian scientists could see that the Love is the only motivator with a fair repetitive experimentation (science) and even probably many has already concluded this and put it in work inside big organizations.

With all said, I've found a very nice example video showing off that Love is the only motivator where it is well said by Steve Jobs who passed away  few months ago.
The video is his speech in-front of Stanford University, during the handing in to him of a diploma Phd from the university to honor his big contribution for the development of the IT industry.

If one watches closely at the speech he will find out  one of the most known enterpreneur of our times claims exactly the same thing "Love is the only Motivator", he says in his speech and speaks about the Love and how one should be driven by the heart in what he does.

It was his Love for his job that make him achieve what he does even though he explains, he went through various "love" for his job trials, many times in his life.

I've taken this speech as a good example since his religion believe was pretty much mixed (he was not Christian, though raised up in Christian family after being adopted). Hence  'The Love being a true motivator' can be observed and understood by a believing devoted Christians but it is like an Universal never changing law God put in the center of our being since he made us in Eden.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address (speech in front of Graduating SU students)

I should add that I didn't support many of the things and religious ideas of Jobs,
as well as I don't believe jobs temporal earth success is something we should strive for.
Anyway I give his speech as an example that even people who are not Christians have figured out the Love being the biggest motivator in doing our job and non-work related daily life.

Some of the things that are anti-christian he says are:

"Remembering we will be death soon is among the most important tools I've encountered to help me make the big choices in life", because almost everything all external expectations or pride or fear of emberassment of failure this things fall away in the face of death. Leaving only what is truly important, remembering that you're going to die is the best way I know to avoid the thinking you have something to loose. YOU ARE ALREADY NAKED, THERE IS NO REASON NOT TO FOLLOW YOUR HEART"

As you can notice in Jobs speech, he obviously doesn't believe in afterlife existence, we people to possesses soul, and  he rejected the Christian belief in existence of Heaven and Hell. He believes the Buddhist lie of the re-incarnation and Hare Krishna's deceptions. The claim that we're all naked in not true, we know said by the Holy Scriptures that all Christians who received the spirit of truth after baptism are dressed up by the same spirit.

Also his idea that "one should follow his heart always" is well romantic but doesn't reflect the Christian teachings, as not following the heart is most important in Christianity but following God's laws on the first place and then our own ways. The follow your heart is no different from Alister Crawley's satanic philosophy saying in his satanic book "The Book of the Law". Do thy your will. Well what jobs tells to this young people is the same in other words "do thy your will".

What is wrong with todays Economy

Tuesday, April 24th, 2012

This question is a serious question imposed at this harsh crisis times. How and why did we ended in an downward spiral economy?
There are many problems which has landed us to where we are. Anyhow there few major ones which played key role.
One is the wrong mindset of CEOs that money is the only motivator for a human behavior. Even though money can be a key motivator it is just one of many factors which motivate company employees to be efficient money is not a heal-all company problems medicine.

According to latest psychological researches conducted by Human Resource Managers. What really motivates people to do what they do full heartedly is not solely money. Social contacts at work place, the level of boredom (or the absence of it), as well as the repetitiveness of tasks, and the freedom given to the individual are key motivation factors.

Nevertheless the many other factors influencing an employee's job prudictivity, money motivation continues to be a factor with a severe weight factor.

The perception held by so many company top managers the amount of money owned and the good possessing are key factors for economy growth or company development is actually an old idea which doesn't reflect todays business reality.

We have seen in the last 30 years many companies like Microsoft and Apple, who started as tiny garage companies and in a short time converted to big corporations employing thousands.

What made this companies succesful ? Was it the money? In our view Obviously NO. Multinational companies like Google and Apple Inc started with a little money capital, but a strong belief that what they do will change the world. What happened we have seen their belief to change the world came true.
In a similar way we at Cadia started with a strong core belief that Offshore Solutions are the future of payments. By pushing the offshore solutions to develop further we believe we will fulfil our mission and change the world just like so many before us did.
Why would one prefer offshore instead of a normal banks? There are two main reasons, one is the plus that your money is not tracked by a banking system and hence fresh money are entering the economy, second is the anonimity it offers.

One of our key values at Cadia is to Respect ours and our customer freedom of privacy.

Its obvious that the business is failing because the shortage of company productivity, caused by the top management idea that its mainly the profit that makes a company a success.

Therefore as long as companies fail to "practice what they preach" e.g. keep to their Values and Company Mission, the situation with our economy will get surely worser. Even though efficiency is increased by the many technological innovations and possibly can be increased by increased money capital, the humans efficiency is falling because the lack of interest in company personal in their daily work.

What this actually means in practice? It means simply employees are not enumareted respectively to their work, companies are trying to cheat between each other puruing the ultimate profit without taking in consideration any established moral or religious norms and a lot more of "wrong" corporal activities which usually lies on the back.

Managers nowdays are ready to "kill and rape" for the good of their sallary rise or the company good, not considering if the effect of a certain company activity will have a long term bad infuence on society or the environment neither if the future consequence collectively will be devastating for humanity.

People on lower positions in companies are looking into managers unlawful activities and after a while, lower position employees start adopting unethical methodologies. Hence suddenly the unethical behaviour of the top management spreads like a virus to the lower levels down to the most low positioned company employees.

The world today is mostly governed by the rich and educated. To be rich anyhow as pointed in Maslows hierarcy of needs (Pyramid) the individual needs to have a Physiological needs & Safety Food, Shelter, basic financial stability existent.

What happens however is that a growing number of country citizens are unable to have a stability like pointed in the 1st two levels of Maslows Pyramid

Governments on the other handy are currenty tolerating non society concerned unethical companies, often even (anti-human) companies. By their tolerance our governments are increasing their dependency on multi national capital growing corporations. The result is a big mess, which becomes almost impossible to fix in time.

The poverty shadow which is falling on so many people today is also a factor changing the usual people mindset. Having the mind to survice in these hard days, a lot of individuals behaviour starts to change and tolerate anything without any examination if it serves a good or bad society purpose. Deception and lies are started to get perceived in humans mind as somethng natural and allowed, hence nobody cares about pursuing high ethical and moral values on individiual level.
The lack of responsibility for humanity on individual level forces governments to do a number of restrictions and police regulations to reduce the unlawfulness and deception between individuals. Increasing the restrictions doesn't change too much because on a peer person to person level the relations iniquity continues to raise.

Among the list of restrictions implied by governments to reduce money frauds is the attempt to close all companies in the Offshore Business providing anonymous money transfers. Anyhow would closing offshores and making all banking operations transperent solve or reduce economic problems? Positively no, it seems like this might help from one side another perspective however reveals that closing all offshore bank accounts would just make the Free Market non free anymore. It will make all payments tracked and carefully put into the ultimate balance sheet… ~

Web Development & System Administration Company DreamupWeb

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

I’ve noticed an ex-colleague as well as a friend of mine’s recently started company who does provide just Wonderful Web Development, SQL database and data processing System Administration services.The new company is named dreamupweb . The whole project looks quitepromising. The already completeled projects do testify the good quality work of the company.END—–

Fix MySQL ibdata file size – ibdata1 file growing too large, preventing ibdata1 from eating all your server disk space

Thursday, April 2nd, 2015

fix-solve-mysql-ibdata-file-size-ibdata1-file-growing-too-large-and-preventing-ibdata1-from-eating-all-your-disk-space-innodb-vs-myisam

If you're a webhosting company hosting dozens of various websites that use MySQL with InnoDB  engine as a backend you've probably already experienced the annoying problem of MySQL's ibdata1 growing too large / eating all server's disk space and triggering disk space low alerts. The ibdata1 file, taking up hundreds of gigabytes is likely to be encountered on virtually all Linux distributions which run default MySQL server <= MySQL 5.6 (with default distro shipped my.cnf). The excremental ibdata1 raise appears usually due to a application software bug on how it queries the database. In theory there are no limitation for ibdata1 except maximum file size limitation set for the filesystem (and there is no limitation option set in my.cnf) meaning it is quite possible that under certain conditions ibdata1 grow over time can happily fill up your server LVM (Storage) drive partitions.

Unfortunately there is no way to shrink the ibdata1 file and only known work around (I found) is to set innodb_file_per_table option in my.cnf to force the MySQL server create separate *.ibd files under datadir (my.cnf variable) for each freshly created InnoDB table.
 

1. Checking size of ibdata1 file

On Debian / Ubuntu and other deb based Linux servers datadir is /var/lib/mysql/ibdata1

server:~# du -hsc /var/lib/mysql/ibdata1
45G     /var/lib/mysql/ibdata1
45G     total


2. Checking info about Databases and Innodb storage Engine

server:~# mysql -u root -p
password:

mysql> SHOW DATABASES;
+——————–+
| Database           |
+——————–+
| information_schema |
| bible              |
| blog               |
| blog-sezoni        |
| blogmonastery      |
| daniel             |
| ezmlm              |
| flash-games        |


Next step is to get some understanding about how many existing InnoDB tables are present within Database server:

 

mysql> SELECT COUNT(1) EngineCount,engine FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema NOT IN ('information_schema','performance_schema','mysql') GROUP BY engine;
+————-+——–+
| EngineCount | engine |
+————-+——–+
|         131 | InnoDB |
|           5 | MEMORY |
|         584 | MyISAM |
+————-+——–+
3 rows in set (0.02 sec)

To get some more statistics related to InnoDb variables set on the SQL server:
 

mysqladmin -u root -p'Your-Server-Password' var | grep innodb


Here is also how to find which tables use InnoDb Engine

mysql> SELECT table_schema, table_name
    -> FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
    -> WHERE engine = 'innodb';

+————–+————————–+
| table_schema | table_name               |
+————–+————————–+
| blog         | wp_blc_filters           |
| blog         | wp_blc_instances         |
| blog         | wp_blc_links             |
| blog         | wp_blc_synch             |
| blog         | wp_likes                 |
| blog         | wp_wpx_logs              |
| blog-sezoni  | wp_likes                 |
| icanga_web   | cronk                    |
| icanga_web   | cronk_category           |
| icanga_web   | cronk_category_cronk     |
| icanga_web   | cronk_principal_category |
| icanga_web   | cronk_principal_cronk    |


3. Check and Stop any Web / Mail / DNS service using MySQL

server:~# ps -efl |grep -E 'apache|nginx|dovecot|bind|radius|postfix'

Below cmd should return empty output, (e.g. Apache / Nginx / Postfix / Radius / Dovecot / DNS etc. services are properly stopped on server).

4. Create Backup dump all MySQL tables with mysqldump

Next step is to create full backup dump of all current MySQL databases (with mysqladmin):

server:~# mysqldump –opt –allow-keywords –add-drop-table –all-databases –events -u root -p > dump.sql
server:~# du -hsc /root/dump.sql
940M    dump.sql
940M    total

 

If you have free space on an external backup server or remotely mounted attached (NFS or SAN Storage) it is a good idea to make a full binary copy of MySQL data (just in case something wents wrong with above binary dump), copy respective directory depending on the Linux distro and install location of SQL binary files set (in my.cnf).
To check where are MySQL binary stored database data (check in my.cnf):

server:~# grep -i datadir /etc/mysql/my.cnf
datadir         = /var/lib/mysql

If server is CentOS / RHEL Fedora RPM based substitute in above grep cmd line /etc/mysql/my.cnf with /etc/my.cnf

if you're on Debian / Ubuntu:

server:~# /etc/init.d/mysql stop
server:~# cp -rpfv /var/lib/mysql /root/mysql-data-backup

Once above copy completes, DROP all all databases except, mysql, information_schema (which store MySQL existing user / passwords and Access Grants and Host Permissions)

5. Drop All databases except mysql and information_schema

server:~# mysql -u root -p
password:

 

mysql> SHOW DATABASES;

DROP DATABASE blog;
DROP DATABASE sessions;
DROP DATABASE wordpress;
DROP DATABASE micropcfreak;
DROP DATABASE statusnet;

          etc. etc.

ACHTUNG !!! DON'T execute!DROP database mysql; DROP database information_schema; !!! – cause this might damage your User permissions to databases

6. Stop MySQL server and add innodb_file_per_table and few more settings to prevent ibdata1 to grow infinitely in future

server:~# /etc/init.d/mysql stop

server:~# vim /etc/mysql/my.cnf
[mysqld]
innodb_file_per_table
innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT
innodb_log_file_size=1G
innodb_buffer_pool_size=4G

Delete files taking up too much space – ibdata1 ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1

server:~# cd /var/lib/mysql/
server:~#  rm -f ibdata1 ib_logfile0 ib_logfile1
server:~# /etc/init.d/mysql start
server:~# /etc/init.d/mysql stop
server:~# /etc/init.d/mysql start
server:~# ps ax |grep -i mysql

 

You should get no running MySQL instance (processes), so above ps command should return blank.
 

7. Re-Import previously dumped SQL databases with mysql cli client

server:~# cd /root/
server:~# mysql -u root -p < dump.sql

Hopefully import should went fine, and if no errors experienced new data should be in.

Altearnatively if your database is too big and you want to import it in less time to mitigate SQL downtime, instead import the database with:

server:~# mysql -u root -p
password:
mysql>  SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;
mysql> SOURCE /root/dump.sql;
mysql> SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;

 

If something goes wrong with the import for some reason, you can always copy over sql binary files from /root/mysql-data-backup/ to /var/lib/mysql/
 

8. Connect to mysql and check whether databases are listable and re-check ibdata file size

Once imported login with mysql cli and check whther databases are there with:

server:~# mysql -u root -p
SHOW DATABASES;

Next lets see what is currently the size of ibdata1, ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1
 

server:~# du -hsc /var/lib/mysql/{ibdata1,ib_logfile0,ib_logfile1}
19M     /var/lib/mysql/ibdata1
1,1G    /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile0
1,1G    /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile1
2,1G    total

Now ibdata1 will grow, but only contain table metadata. Each InnoDB table will exist outside of ibdata1.
To better understand what I mean, lets say you have InnoDB table named blogdb.mytable.
If you go into /var/lib/mysql/blogdb, you will see two files
representing the table:

  •     mytable.frm (Storage Engine Header)
  •     mytable.ibd (Home of Table Data and Table Indexes for blogdb.mytable)

Now construction will be like that for each of MySQL stored databases instead of everything to go to ibdata1.
MySQL 5.6+ admins could relax as innodb_file_per_table is enabled by default in newer SQL releases.


Now to make sure your websites are working take few of the hosted websites URLs that use any of the imported databases and just browse.
In my case ibdata1 was 45GB after clearing it up I managed to save 43 GB of disk space!!!

Enjoy the disk saving! 🙂

Don’t revoke GoDaddy SSL certificate. (Expired) Revoked SSL is impossible to revert

Thursday, April 12th, 2012

godaddy_logo
One of our company SSL (https) Certificates recently expired so I needed to renew the SSL certificate.

I was in a hurry doing plenty of other stuffs so it seemed logical for me to Revoke the Certificate. I thought revoking the certificate will simply cancel it and afterwards, in Godaddy's SSL (Manager Certificates) interface the Revoked – Cancelled certificate will re-appear in the menu, ready to be generated in the same way as earlier I initially generated the Godaddy's bought SSL certificate

Hence I proceeded and used Revoke button:

Godaddy SSL certificate manager browser certificate Screenshot

Well guess what my calculations, were wrong.
 Revoking, just cancel it. The  revoked domain SSL certificate did not show up again in Godaddy's Cert Manager and I have no way from their interface to revert the changes.

To deal with the situation, I contacted Godaddy Support immediately with the following inquiry:
 

Other : Revoked SSL Certificate
Issue :
Hello we have revoked the SSL certificate for our domain our.domain-name.com.
 Can we revert back the certificate as it was.
If not how to generate a new key for our domain https://our.domain-name.com
Thanks in Advance.
Kindest Regards

"My-Company-name" Tech Support

In 5 hours time I received the following tech support answer:
 

Dear Tech Support,

Thank you for contacting Online Support. It is not possible to reinstate a canceled certificate. You will need to purchase a new certificate. I have requested that a refund be applied to your account. Once the credit appears in your account, please allow 5-7 business days to see the funds applied to the associated payment method. Thank you for your patience and understanding in this matter.

Please let us know if we can help you in any other way.

Sincerely,

Christian P.
Online Support Team
Customer Inquiry
Name : Cadia Tech Support
Domain Name : our.domain-name.com
ShopperID : xxxxxxxxx
Phone : xxxxxxxx
Shopper Validated : Yes
Browser : Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3

Apparently Godaddy, can work out a bit on their tech support answering time 5 hours for a simple reply is quite long.

Now taking in consideration, above reply from Godady, my only options are to either wait for 5 to 7 (business days) or buy a new credit for SSL certificate.

Buying a new credit will probably not happen as our company is experiencing some financial troubles because of the crisis. So I guess we will have to wait for this 7 days at worst. So again if you wonder to REVOKE or not an SSL certificate. Think again …

Just a small note to make here, that Godaddy has a very straight forward way to just renew an expered certificate, which I succesfully later have done for 4 domains. Well, if only I knew earlier what REVOKE SSL cert really does I wouldn't have ended in this mess …

Howto install GeoTrust RapidSSL certificate on Debian Lenny / Squeeze / Wheezy Linux

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

I faced the task of generating official Validated SSL Certificates by in mydaily duties as a System Administrator at cadiaholding.com . Though generating self-signedSSL certificate is comparatively easy task. It was a pain in the ass setting Apache version 2.2.9-10+lenny6to correctly serve pages through https:// protocol over openssl version 0.9.8g-15+lenny6.I’ll try to go through the whole process of Generating the certificate in order to help some other Debianusers out there to face less setbacks in such a simple task as installing a Trusted SSL Certificate issued(bought) by RapidSSL. Even though this article will mostly deal with SSL certificate issued by RapidSSL,it should be not a problem to apply this methodogy with Verisign or some of the other Geotrust issuedSecure Socket Layer certificates.

In generating the Validated certficate I used enom which is a domain name,ssl certificates, email and hosting company whole-saler.
Fron emon’s website after logging in and using the web interface, there are two major things required to fill inin order to issue your Trusted SSL certificate.

1. Fill in in a form a CSR file, this is usually generated on the Linux server using the openssl.
To issue the CSR file required by Enom use the following commands:

a. First we generate an DES3 RSA encrypted key which we will use next to generate the opeensl CSR file required by ENOM.
debian:~# /usr/bin/openssl genrsa -des3 -out www.domain.com.key 2048
Enter pass phrase for www.domain.com.key:

You’ll be required to fill in a pass-phrase that will be later be required to fill in before Apache servers starts or restarts,so make sure you fill something you either remember or you keep the password stored in a file.
You have to change also the www.domain.com.key in accordance with your domain name.
Now as we already have a proper generated DES3 RSA key afterwards it’s necessery to generate the CSR file with the openssl command line frontend.
So here is how:

debian:~# /usr/bin/openssl req -new -key /home/hipo/www.domain.com.key -out /home/hipo/www.domain.com.csr

Again in the above example change all the paths and file names as you wish.
It’s necessery that the end user fill in a number of questions related to the Certificate Signing Request.
Herein I’ll list what kind of prompts will emerge after executing the above command:

Enter pass phrase for /home/hipo/www.domain.com.key:
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:
Locality Name (eg, city) []:
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:
Email Address []:
Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:

Note that you’ll hav eto fill in the pass phrase previously entered during the generation of the www.domain.com.key file.
In case if you’d like to read more thoroughly on the subject of howto create a Certificate Signing Request or (CSR) as we called it on multiple times, you can read About Certificate Signing Request (CSR) Generation Instructions – Apache SSL more in depth here

2. Hopefully following the above instructions you’ll now have a file named www.domain.csrJust open the www.domain.scr and copy paste it’s content to the ENOM website CSR * webform.

3. Further on select your Webserver type on Enom’s website:In our case we have to select Apache + ApacheSSL

4. What follows next is filling in your company contact information This is also required for proper certificate generation, you have to think twice before you fill in this data, take a note this can’t be changed later on without issuing a brand SSL new certificate.

Apart from the 3 major above requirements to fill in Enom there are some few more radio buttons to use to make some selections according to your personal preferences, however I won’t take time to dig in that and I’ll leave this to you.
After all the above is fulfilled you’ll have to submit your certificate details and choose an email address to which you will receive in a minute a RapidSSL Certificate Request Confirmation

Following a link from the email, will show you some basic information about the certificate about to be generated. That’s your final chance to cancel the issued Trusted Certificated.
If you’re absolutely sure the information about to enter the certificate is correct then you’ll have to follow a link and approve the certificate.

You’ll be informed that you’ll receive your certificate either through Certifier website (e.g. Enom’s website) or via another email.
I thought it’s more probable I receive it via email but anyways I was wrong. More thank 4 hours has passed since the certificate was issued and is available via Enom’s interface but I haven’t received nothing on my mail.
Therefore my friendly advice is to check about your brand new shiny Trusted Certificate on Emom’s website. I had mine ready in about 10 minutes after the CSR was issued.

Assuming that you’ve succesfully obtained the SSL Trusted certificate from RapidSSL what follows is setting up the certificate.
Initially I tried using documentation from RapidSSL website called Installing your SSL Certificate / Web Server Certificate / Secure Server Certificate from RapidSSL.com
I tried to configure one of my Virtualhost as shown in their example inserting in my /etc/apache/sites-available/www.domain.com file, few directives within the VirtualHost something like the shown below

SSLEngine on
# domain.com.crt cointains the Trusted SSL certificate generated and obtained by you from RapidSSL
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/www.domain.com.crt
# www.domain.com.key contains the file used to generate the CSR file as described earlier in this post
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/www.domain.com.key

It is also possible insetad of using the SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile directvies directives in Apache config to use:

 

Another alternative is to use

SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/your-domain-name.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/certs/your-domain-name.key
SSLCACertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/gd_bundle.crt

The key file is the one generated earlier on the server and handed to the SSL regisrar, the files:

your-domain-name.crt and gd_bundle.crt files are provided by RapidSSL or from whatever SSL registrater the SSL was purchased.

After trying the above configuration and restarting apache with:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Apache failed to start, it might be helpful to somebody out there the error I had in my apache error.log:
The error.log red the following:

[warn] RSA server certificate is a CA certificate (BasicConstraints: CA == TRUE !?)

After some 30 minutes or an hour of Googling on the error I came to the conclusion that the error is caused, becauseApache is supposed to work with .PEM files instead of the classical .CRT and .KEY files asnormally approached in most of the other Unix operating systems.

It took me a bit more of reading on the internet to find out that actually the .pem files so widely adopted in Debian simply contain both the www.domain.com.key file and the www.domain.com.crt key simply pasted one after another, this I also observed from the default Apache self-signed certificate that I believe comes with debian /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem .
So I copied both the content of my www.domain.com.key and www.domain.com.crt and store it in one file:
/etc/apache2/ssl/www.domain.com.pem

Also the following configuration:
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/www.domain.com.pem

had to go in your
/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/www.domain.com

Last thing that’s left is to restart your Apache;

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Apache will prompt you for your certificate password entered by you during the www.domain.com.key generation. Type your password and with a bit of luck and hopefully with God’s help you’ll be having a Trusted Certificate on your webserver.

Last step is to check if the certificate is okay accessing your domain https://www.domain.com.

Well this is the end of the article, hope you enjoy.If you do please leave your comments, any corrections are also welcomed 🙂

Preserve domain name after redirect with mod_rewrite and some useful mod rewrite redirect and other examples – Redirect domain without changing URL

Friday, July 11th, 2014

redirect_domain_name_without_changing_url_apache_rewrite_rule_preventing_host_in_ip_mod_rewrite
If you're a webhosting company sysadmin, sooner or later you will be asked by application developer or some client to redirect from an Apache webserver to some other webserver / URL's IP, in a way that the IP gets preserved after the redirect.

I'm aware of two major ways to do the redirect on webserver level:

1. To redirect From Apache host A to Webserver on host B using ReverseProxy mod_proxy

2. To use Mod Rewrite to redirect all client requests on host A to host B.

There is quite a lot to be said and is said and written online on using mod_rewrite to redirect URLs.
So in this article I will not say nothing new but just present some basic scenarios on Redirecting with mod rewrite and some use cases.
Hope this examples, will help some colleague sys-admin to solve some his crazy boss redirection tasks 🙂 I'm saying crazy boss because I already worked for a  start-up company which was into internet marketing and the CEO has insane SEO ideas, often impossible to achieve …

a) Dynamic URL Redirect from Apache host A to host B without changing domain name in browser URL and keeping everything after the query in

Lets say you want to redirect incoming traffic to DomainA to DomainB keeping whole user browser request, i.e.

Redirect:

http://your-domainA.com/whole/a/lot/of/sub/directory/query.php


Passthe the whole request including /whole/a/lot/of/sub/directory/query.php

so when Apache redirects to redirect to:

http://your-domainB.com/whole/a/lot/of/sub/directory/query.php

In browser 
To do it with Mod_Rewrite either you have to add in .htaccess mod_rewite rules:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^your-domainA.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^http://your-domainA.com
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://your-domainB.com/$1 [P]

or include this somewhere in VirtualHost configuration of your domain
 

Above mod_rewrite will make any request to your-domainA.com to forward to your-domainB.com while preserving the hostname in browser URL bar to old domain http://your-domainA.com, however still contet will be served by http://your-domainB.com
 

http://yourdomainA.com/YOUR-CUSTOM-REQUEST-ADDRESS


to redirect to

http://yourdomainB.com/YOUR-CUSTOM-REQUEST-ADDRESS


WARNING !!  If you're concerned about your SEO well positioning in search Engines, be sure to never ever use such redirects. Making such redirects will cause two domains to show up duplicate content
and will make Search Engines to reduce your Google, Yahoo, Yandex etc. Pagerank !!

Besides that such, redirect will use mod_rewrite on each and every redirect so from performance stand point it is a CPU killer (for such redirect using native mod_proxy ProxyPass is much more efficient – on websites with hundred of thousands of requests daily using such redirects will cause you to spend your  hardware badly  …)

P.S. ! Mod_Rewrite and Proxy modules needs to be previously enabled
On Debian Linux, make sure following links are existing and pointing to proper existing files from /etc/apache2/mods-available/ to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled

debian:~#  ls -al /etc/apache2/mods-available/*proxy*
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  87 Jul 26  2011 /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy_ajp.load
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 355 Jul 26  2011 /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy_balancer.conf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  97 Jul 26  2011 /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy_balancer.load
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 803 Jul 26  2011 /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy.conf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  95 Jul 26  2011 /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy_connect.load
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 141 Jul 26  2011 /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy_ftp.conf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  87 Jul 26  2011 /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy_ftp.load
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  89 Jul 26  2011 /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy_http.load
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  62 Jul 26  2011 /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy.load
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  89 Jul 26  2011 /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy_scgi.load

debian:/etc/apache2/mods-avaialble:~# ls *proxy*
proxy.conf@  proxy_connect.load@  proxy_http.load@  proxy.load@


If it is is not enabled to enable proxy support in Apache on Debian / Ubuntu Linux, either create the symbolic links as you see them from above paste or issue with root:
 

a2enmod proxy_http
a2enmod proxy

 

b) Redirect Main Domain requests to other Domain specific URL
 

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^your-domainA.com
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://your-domainB.com/YOUR-CUSTOM-URL [P]

Note that no matter what kind of subdirectory you request on http://your-domain.com (lets say you type in http://your-domainA.com/My-monkey-sucks ) it will get redirected to:

http://your-domainB.com/YOUR-CUSTOM-URL

Sometimes this is convenient for SEO, because it can make you to redirect any requests (including mistakenly typed requests by users or Bot Crawlers to real existing landing page).

c) Redirecting an IP address to a Domain Name

This probably a very rare thing to do as usually a Domain Name is redirected to an IP, however if you ever need to redirect IP to Domain Name:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^##.##.##.##
RewriteRule (.*) http://your-domainB.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Replace ## with digits of your IP address, the is used to escape the (.) – dots are normally interpreted by mod_rewrite.

d) Rewritting URL extensions from .htm to .php, doc to docx etc.

Lets say you're updating an old website with .htm or .html to serve .php files with same names as old .htmls use following rewrite rules:. Or all your old .doc files are converted and replaced with .docx and you need to make Apache redirect all .doc requests to .docx.
 

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [NC]

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).doc$ $1.docx [NC]

The [NC] flag at the end means "No Case", or "case-insensitive"; Meaning it will not matter whether files are requested with capital or small letters, they will just show files if file under requested name is matched.

Using such a redirect will not cause Apache to redirect old files .html, .htm, .doc and they will still be accessible again creating duplicate content which will have a negavite impact on Search Engine Optimization.

The better way to do old extensioned files redirect is by using:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.+).htm$ http://your-domainB.com/$1.php [R,NC]

[R] flag would tell make mod_rewrite send HTTP "MOVED TEMPORARILY" redirection, aka, "302" to browser. This would cause search engines and other spidering entities will automatically update their links to the new locations.

e) Grabbing content from URL with Mod Rewrite and passing it to another domain

Lets say you want zip files contained in directory files/ to be redirected from your current webserver on domainA to domainB's download.php script and be passed as argument to the script

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^files/([^/]+)/([^/]+).zip https://www.pc-freak.net/download.php?section=$1&file=$2 [R,NC]


f) Shortening URLs with mod_rewrite

This is ueful If you have a long URL address accessible via some fuzzy long hard to remember URL address and you want to make it acessible via a shorter URL without phyisally moving the files within a short named directory, do:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^james-brown /james-brown/files/download/download.php

Above rule would make requests coming to http://your-domain.com/james-brown?file=my.zip be opened via http://mysite/public/james-brown/files/download/download.php?file=my.zip

g) Get rid of the www in your domain name

Nowdays many people are used to typing www.your-domain.com, if this annoys you and you want them not to see in served URLs the annoying www nonsense, use this:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^www.your-domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://your-domain.com/$1 [R=301,NC]

That's mostly some common uses of mod rewrite redirection, there are thousands of nice ones. If you know others, please share?


References and thanks to:

How to redirect domain without changing the URL

More .htaccess tips and tricks – part 2