Try New Technology

I had a case where my Documents, My Music, My Pictures, and Video folders had been mapped to a network share. After tuning this off I had odd issues when emptying the Recycling Bin. I found that even though I had thought I remapped them back to my C:\ drive Windows didn’t agree. You will know you have this problem if you right-click the Recycle Bin -> Properties and see more than the Local (C:) (or whatever drive it is) listed. Obviously if you want Bins on these other drives that is up to you, but if you wanted to remove them as I did, see below.

Try the following I found while searching forums:

• Open the file explorer,
• navigate to the share in question that has the recycle bin,
• right click in the empty space,
• click on “Properties”,
• If there is a “Locations” tab at the top, go to that tab and click on “Restore Default” and press ok.

You might have to reboot, even though I didn’t.

I found that a website running WordPress can become loaded down with a lot of page loads because wp-cron.php is called everytime, and on a site that isn’t and “active” blog it is not needed. In those cases it is helpful to the server load and page loads to disabled wp-cron.php from being ran automatically and set it up as a cronjob. See the below options to do this:

• Edit the wp-config.php file
• Disable the wp-cron.php from automatically running by going to the bottom of the database settings in wp-config.php (around line 37).
• Add the code:
  define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', 'true');

  Directly under the define('DB_COLLATE', ''); like:

  /** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

  define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', 'true');

• Save the file wp-config.php file.
• Add a cronjob (via Cron Job in your Control Panel, or crontab via CLI) with something like the following and set it to run every 6 hours or so:
  curl http://www.domain.name/wp-cron.php

You may have found the similar advise to what I wrote above on other web sites they will generally use “php -q” to run the wp-cron.php fil. Now the side-affect this can produce when using “php -q” vs “curl” (or “wget”) to call the wp-cron.php in your Crontab/Cronjob is you might start getting an error_log file with “Cannot send session cookie – headers already sent in” if one of your plugins or a file that is being ran by the cronjob has a session_start() call in the code such as Nivo Slider does.
Example (found around line 19 of nivo-slider.php):
if ( !session_id() ) session_start();

I was testing how well FreePBX 5.211.65-5 (Asterisk 11) would deal with loosing a drive. After unplugging the drive and finding that it boots fine, I reconnected the drive an assumed it would re-sync the Software RAID. Sadly that did not happen and when looking at System Admin -> Storage I saw sdb green, then another sdb in red. After some hunting online I found the following solution:

Via Console/SSH:

See the status of the RAID by:

cat /proc/mdstat

I noticed that md0 and md2 were only 2/1 drives and that sda1 and sda3 (respectively) were missing, but md1 had sda2 and sdb2 listed fine.

I then ran the following two commands and waited for the Software RAID to resync/recover:

mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sda1
mdadm /dev/md2 --add /dev/sda3

Now if I run

cat /proc/mdstat

It shows they are waiting to resync and one is currently in recovery state.

NOTE: Remember lsblk is your friend when you are unsure of what drives are part of which RAID.

• Click Start, and then click Run.
• Type “control userpasswords2”, and then click OK.
• Uncheck the “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer” check box, and then click Apply.
• You will then be prompted to type int he Administrator password. Type it in twice and click OK
• Click OK to close the User Accounts window.

Recently noticed a in-dev WordPress sites I work on calling “POST /wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron” a lot and in turn the server load jumps up (15.0 at times!). After a lot of digging around I decided it wasn’t something like WP Super Cache glitching since they don’t use that Plug-in.

After a lot of Google searching I found out how to just disable the wp-cron.php from running every time a page is called. As I understand this is NOT something you want to do if the WordPress is updated a lot as a blog site, but since this one isn’t I figured setting it to manually run wp-cron.php every 6 hours might be best.

A quick synapse of what the link above will show:

edit the wp-config.php and add “define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, ‘true’);” under the following line:

/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Then setup a cronjob via cPanel (or whatever Control Panel you use; even crontab if need be) to run the following (every 6 hours should be good):

php -q /home/username/public_html/wp-cron.php

NOTE: Of course adjust the path accordingly.

As a side note. I noted that at time the page would load slow for the first time (since the site is in DEV not a lot of traffic – well aside from BOTS which create a lot of HTTP lately) and sometimes would be so slow it would create a “lfd on server.domain.ext: Suspicious process running under user username” e-mail telling me that different .php files (index.php, admin-ajax.php, etc.) were running for too long.