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When migrating some WordPress blogs on a multisite install to a new host running Ubuntu, I found all the images were broken in every blog except the first one.

Eventually I found the culprit: the /usr/share/wordpress/.htaccess file was being ignored, which meant the Apache httpd RewriteRule of requests for files/ was not being redirected to the correct blogs.dir/… files (and let’s not dwell on how inefficient it is serving large files via ms-files.php, which is apparently only used for multisite blogs created before WordPress 3.5):

RewriteRule ^files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1 [L]

To fix this problem, I enabled .htaccess for /usr/share/wordpress by creating /etc/apache2/conf-available/wordpress.conf with the following contents:

# Allow .htaccess in WordPress directory
# Without this to enable .htaccess, images/files in multisite WordPress installs would be broken due to missing rewrite rule

<Directory /usr/share/wordpress>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
</Directory>

Then I enabled it with a2enconf wordpress.conf and systemctl reload apache2.

Hope this helps someone save some time!

Watch out – lvmcache doesn’t support snapshots yet! I discovered this when my backup system tried to create a snapshot of a filesystem to back up after I enabled lvmcache on it.

I removed the cache pool logical volume (disabling lvmcache for the volume) using lvremove, and will re-visit once lvmcache’d volumes have snapshot support (since snapshots are very important for consistent backups).

Background on lvmcache – it is a new LVM feature that uses dm-cache to cache blocks for slower storage (like a HDD) on faster storage (like a SSD) for faster access.

Trouble getting Drupal 8.1.x development branch to install due to the following error or similar?

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function get() on a non-object in Drupal.php on line 285

There is a workaround – go to your site’s /core/install.php URL directly.

Was your SplashID Safe database corrupted with many duplicate and non-ASCII character entries?

It happened to me multiple times when syncing between the mobile and desktop SpashID Safe clients – so I created a script to remove the entries, reducing my DB size from 2500 entries back to the actual 900 entries.

I put the quick script on GitHub in case anyone else finds it useful. It is based on linuxsquad’s Convert-SplashID-to-KeePassX scripts.

(I started using SplashID Safe during the PalmOS days and have not since switched – though I’ve considered KeePass and KeePassX.)

I like the concept and convenience of over-the-network upgrades with minimal downtime, but FedUp (Fedora‘s new official method) did not work quite right for my Fedora 18 to Fedora 20 upgrade without some hackery.

Here is what I had to do to get the upgrade to work:

Otherwise I followed the FedUp directions, then after the upgrade completed I tested services and fixed up configs and file permissions that had been changed during the upgrade.

If you are having other problems with a FedUp upgrade, you may want to browse the FedUp bug list to see if any apply and if workarounds have been posted in the comments.

Hope this helps!

Getting those pesky “Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance” messages when creating partitions on your new 3TB-4TB disk using GNU parted under Linux?

Start parted with the “-a optimal” command line parameter to tell parted to use optimal alignment!

Example:
/sbin/parted -a optimal /dev/sdd

Thanks go to this post on Ask Ubuntu!