QNAP: WordPress Themes Not Displaying Error

So far I have been successful in exporting and importing my Blogger/Blogspot content to WordPress self-hosted. The nice thing to note is that this functionality is now built-in to WordPress and it will work after the initial authentication. After which I used the Category to Tags Coverter plugin which nicely sorted through the various import mismatch. Voila!

There is however one nasty issue. Although my newly converted Blogger-to-WordPress blog displays correctly in my internal network the view from the outside looking-in (external viewers) is largely flawed, to say the least. The WordPress themes, no matter what I change them to, are broken!

I found out the hard way and ticking off several theories.

1. Theme error?

I switched to the most basic theme and to my preferred ones, no game.

2. WordPress file and folder permissions?

Not sure what was up I re-installed several times and even updated to the latest 3.0.1 (which is another horror story altogether for another time). Still no juice, but that doesn't mean it isn't a particular file/folder permission setting.

3. Apache webserver and .htaccess rules?

I disabled, commented-out, deleted, created several .htaccess files in various folders but to no avail. It could be a general error under the main rules file that prevents serving images under the WordPress subfolder and yet why does it allow images on my phpBB and Joomla sites?

This is a mystery that needs to be solved and damn if I don't figure it out, soon.

For now I'm going through the official WordPress Codex notes on changing file permissions.

Update: 2010/November/22 @ 1:09AM

After ranting to my friends over dinner and swearing to move onto Joomla!, I simmered down and re-forwarded all my domains back to BlogSpot temporarily. After which I re-read the Codex and read through changing the site URL portion. The shortest path for me without messing with too many entries was to use the Relocate method, and it works. Eureka!

Here is how to do it:

1. Switch to editing mode (or followed the first 3 steps from my previous post)

2. Edit the wp-config.php file

3. Go to the end of the file and add the new temporary line:

define('RELOCATE',true);

4. Open your browser to your apparently-broken-to-external-wordpress-page and log-in:

ex. http://my-broken-wordpress-page.com/wordpress/wp-login.php

5. Log-in as normal

Since the RELOCATE flag set to true, your siteurl (General Settings -> WordPress address) will be auto-magically updated to whatever path you used to access the log-in screen. This will generally get the admin section functional but will not necessarily fix all the sections of your setup. You'll have to go through the rest of the blog and comb through the kinks if you find them. For now, my external viewers can now see this blog in its intended glory. Hooah!

Security tip:
Remove the added line once you get your site up and running. Leaving it there may break it (or leave your WordPress blog open to one).

QNAP: Apache and Needed Information

So you're setting up various things like your WordPress or perhaps messing around with some internals based on tips you get across the web. You type them in then doesn't work and says you have invalid or the wrong user permissions. What gives?

Don't forget you are working on a semi-embedded environment and not all things follow what is on Apache spec all the time. So how do you find out more about your installation without having to be able to read all these script lines? Let the installed system work for you of course. Everything is working on the basic that means you just need to know what the settings are.

First things first, get your tools and be where you should:

Step #1: Download WinSCP (or if you're further advanced feel free to use ssh).

Step #2: Log-in to the NAS as admin

Using username "admin".

Step #3: Change directories to Qweb

[~] # cd /share/Qweb/

You are now at the root of your web server, you have the following options:

Step #4a: To find out what user your instance (Apache default is httpd) is running as (QNAP default is httpdusr), create a temporary file, mine is called phpinfo1.php, and it only contains one line:

Step #4b: To dump all that is known from the system, create a temporary file, mine is called phpinfo2.php, and it only contains one line:

Step #5: Whatever your choice is from either of the last two-(2) steps above, open a browser instance and run the relative PHP file.

http://(your-ip-address)/phpinfo1.php
http://(your-ip-address)/phpinfo2.php

Security tip:

Once you are done with the scripts above, DELETE them. You risk divulging critical information about your installation if you leave these files lying around.

QNAP: WordPress and Connection Information

Newbie users like me will probably be stumped when faced with this ftp log-in screen when trying to update/upgrade/patch WordPress and/or plugins. You can attempt to guess and enter your details but there's a fair chance the whole process will fail midway through the next steps. Why? What to do?

Chris was quite helpful to get me on the right path. I have outlined the steps below for us QNAP users:

Step #1: Download WinSCP (or if you're further advanced feel free to use ssh).

Step #2: Log-in to the NAS as admin

Using username "admin".

Step #3: Change directories to wordpress

[~] # cd /share/Qweb/wordpress/

Step #4: Change the file permissions of the current folder and sub-folder contents

[/share/Qweb/wordpress] # chown -R httpdusr:administrators ./

Step #5: Exit the console

[/share/Qweb/wordpress] # exit

Step #6: Open your browser, get back to your WordPress admin console

http://(your-ip-address)/wp-login.php

Step #7: Pour yourself a nice beverage

Step #8: Enjoy!

As soon as you're done, make sure to start updating everything.

Security tip: Outdated WordPress installations and plugins are bad.

QNAP: RAID 6 to the Rescue (continued)

Its the onset of Fall and the leaves are starting to make a mound in the backyard. There's been some rain as well. With the seasons changing that also means the room temperature as well.

This morning was the first time I ever saw the advantages of RAID 6.

Actually, the single advantage appears to be stability in the face of two-(2) failed hard drives. For some reason Slot-6 and then Slot-1 started to act up and drop out of the RAID. Now, I know there's nothing wrong with them and my efforts to check the temperature history should little variance. What I did to recover was to simply pull out, dust off, then jammed (literally) the drives back in. This seems to have worked and the RAID just went ahead and rebuilt itself.

Scary, with several NAS once in a while making beeps you get to a point of ignoring these please of alert. Literally the first time Slot-6 fell it wasn't even apparent to me that something was going on as the QNAP is a heavily used file server with gigabytes of transfer going on at all times of the day.

So was it really the weather?

I was going through some forums as well just now and did see some reports similar to what I had just described. Some say firmware on the NAS, some say its the WD20EADS drives -- to me it was the weather and I'll stick to my theory unless something else comes up. :-)

Did this experience help me to reconsider aiming for RAID 5 and recovering 2TB? Maybe, just a little.

However, if things push forward and I get the chance to transfer the main download/upload function to a data center ...? 2TB back for storage please, thank you very much!

QNAP: Joomla! and Wordpress - Installation Errors

I've finally figured out the problem causing the installation failure of extensions, write permissions on the folders under /share/Qweb/Joomla/

It makes sense, if you can't write to it then you can't damn well install it. If only the installation would take care of those issues automatically, eh?

Make sure to issue chmod 777 (that's read and writer permissions) for the ff: folders:
/share/Qweb/Joomla
/share/Qweb/wordpress

In fact the JoomlaHack Tip #3 mentions having to change file and folder permissions. Earlier in 2007 and later in 2008 there are several posts from QNAPAndy that mention this needs to be done for everything under the /share/Qweb subfolder.

I have recommended about the same for WordPress in this QNAP Forum thread.

QNAP: Add another drive to RAID 6, Part II

Its already Tuesday and the expansion is stuck at 75%. All services don't want to work and the space shown via ssh is only 25-MB, plus /dev/md0 is unmounted. The system is still emitting that irritating double long beep every so often that I hear it in my sleep.

There is too much data on those RAID drives now, now way will I accept it getting lost. Knock on wood! I'm scared and loosing sleep over it :-(

I saw a link to someone having expansion problems in the forum as well as the follow-up solution. In case a reboot won't work there was another way shown. ..... Its a backup plan.

But really, hopefully my process actually works and I can send some more positive feedback to users who would rather not have to mess with the internals and stick to the interface. Though QNAP Tech Support is in California and sound to be very helpful, I'd much rather not have to deal with any form of remote access to my machines as much as possible.

Lets be clear that the SATA Disk view still says that all my drives are healthy. The fact that /dev/md0 is already unmounted may actually mean that at 75% this is in Step #9 of the suggested manual expansion process. :-)

But I'm still not sure :-(

QNAP: Add another drive to RAID 6?

Yesterday I mentioned that everything was working well in terms of building a 7x2TB configuration while the remaining 2TB of data from an external connection was transferred over to the RAID.

Well, this morning all the copying seemed to have finished overnight which meant it was time to plug the last 2TB drive and expand the size of the RAID.

Funny, I was about to say "RAID array" but that is redundant being as RAID does mean "redundant array of individual disks" so saying it would have been like referring to a "redundant array of individual disks ARRAY". No, duh.

It looks to be there is a terminology difference in the jargon used and its confusing. What makes it more difficult is that there isn't enough specific information about what one has to do if using RAID 5 vs RAID 6. After much head-to-knuckle banging (at the possible data loss in one fell swoop of a misconfigured array), a clue on the Wikipedia definition of RAID 6 helped. So it looks to be that its considered by some "RAID 5 + 2 spare disks". Meaning that I could take the "Add hard drive" under the RAID Management tab even if it says only for RAID 5 and implement it on my RAID 6 - which I did. The results are in the first graphic above as well as some intermittent dual-beeping coming from the TS-809 right now.

Those 2 beeps (per the manual, yes of course I read it) mean any of the following things: HDD volume is filling up (don't think so), HDD is indeed full (nope), HDD is in degraded/failed mode (nah), HDD starts/currently rebuidling (YES!!).

So, right now the RAID is rebuilding as a result of the added disk and also calling the expand module. Its still stuck at 1% but like the initial building where I was letting it multi-task copying from the last 2TB drive in the set, its more probably a result of me copying 69-GB of data at 18 MB/s over the gigabit network to one of the NAS' shared drives.

Time to wait and see and a post-update later ....

Apple Mac OS X:Time Machine

Thanks to the QNAP TS-809 Pro being Linux based, it was snap easy to have it create an iSCSI Target.

For those not quite familiar, iSCSI target provisioning allows a shared folder on your SAN (in this case a NAS) to be created and treated as a virtual storage volume.

Specific Mac instructions for all QNAP devices are here. All of this of course wouldn't be possible without globalSAN's iSCSI initiator which they've provided free.

QNAP: RAID size and 2TB drive support?

Per the press release on March 25, its all good finally after much waiting and forum discussion. :-)
http://www.qnap.com/PressRelease_detail.asp?pr_id=128

"Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB (WD20EADS) SATA hard drive is now supported by the entire TS-109/ 209/ 409/ 509/ 439/ 639/ 809 /809U-RP and the latest TS-119/ 219 Turbo NAS series."

"The maximum capacity can be extended up to a total of 16TB now on a TS-809 or 809U-RP' says Andy Chuo, Product Manager from QNAP."

Also, the latest compatibility list published April 22 has the WD20EADS in the list (and notably without any extra remarks!):

Myself, the server just arrived yesterday and I'm currently waiting impatiently for the RAID 6 rebuild to finish on 7x2TB. Currently simultaneously moving files from the front-USB backup (figured I may as well test it) off the final 2TB drive before I add it into the full RAID set.

At 7x2TB its showing me just below 10TB available ... yeah, RAID 6 means (n-2 disks) with each 2TB showing up only as 1.8TB. I just may decide to make it RAID 5 instead when all is done.

RAID 6 and that (write intent) Bitmap

For the semi-uninitiated, what is the importance of RAID 6 over RAID 5 is the question. According to 3ware (apparently one of the leading hardware vendors for RAID) say that "Double-parity RAID, commonly known as RAID 6, safeguards against data loss by allowing up to two consecutive drive failures". The technology brief continues to say that RAID 5 is vulnerable to two-(2) types of error conditions: all data is lost in the unlikely event of a second drive failure during a rebuild; and latent media errors that are undetected media defects in the same case as a disk failure on rebuild. Essentially the conditions are the same in that it generally means you have multiple failures in your array instead of the single spare disk you have allocated. There are also performance hit differences, but essentially it looks to be that RAID 6 has a 10% write penalty advantage while RAID 5 has a 15%.

Another good resource introduction to the pro's and con's comes from an article in 2007 saying that RAID 6 is here and viable given how cheaper storage is today. I would have to agree given that USB thumbdrives can now go as large as 64-GB which used to be about the size of my laptop hard drive in 2003. With SSD drives now as large as 250-GB its now viable to get instant startup gratification.

So what about Write Intent Bitmaps? A related discussion on QNAP has some pointers to other external information, but its all not definitive.

Some poor chap basically got flamed on the QNAP forum for asking. Is this the current state of the world today where the smart-asses attack the green apples? Would the preventive thing to do such as a QNAP Korea forum help? Or is this just lashing out payback in some way when non-English based support forums are your only hope for this smashingly great device that you bought from overseas and you can't speak a spit of that other language? Hmmm ... I digress.

To me, given the result of turning on the Bitmap option has alot to do with RAID 6. Thats an over-simplification but too much reading and my best guess (and hope!) is that between the 4-TB spare total I'm going to have on the TS-809 would be better justified if it were also used to ensure that parity and the speed of any possible crash rebuild/resync with write intent bitmap turned on. Given that 2TB initial loss to RAID 5, it had BETTER be.