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DirectAdmin sent a warning message stating:

The service 'dovecot' on server insert.server.here is currently down

Using DirectAdmin’s Service Monitor to restart it resulted in this error:

/sbin/service dovecot restart 2>&1

So I SSH in and try to restart it manually from the command line:

/sbin/service dovecot start

I receive this error:

Fatal: listen(0.0.0.0, 993) failed: Address already in use

So we need to find you what is hogging port 993 by using the lsof command:

lsof -i:993

lsof tells me that PID 2083 is bound to port 993 so I kill it:

kill 2083

Dovecot starts successfully. Yay!

Read more lsof information at dmiessler.com

A new year is coming so I thought I try out a new “help desk / support / trouble ticket” solution. I stumbled across Trellis Desk 1.0 and found myself pleasantly surprised because it was extremely quick and easy to install on a DirectAdmin server. The installation process threw up a few warning flags that I could have ignored but I decided to take care of them. Here are some notes on installing FreeType and increasing the HTTP/PHP upload limit:

Installing FreeType

These instructions from lampdocs.com are fairly complete. The only step that is some what vague is recompiling PHP with your configure string.

Change directories to your PHP installation. The instructions tell you to issue this command:

cd /usr/local/directadmin/customapache/php-4.4.8

I had to replace the ‘php-4.4.8′ with ‘php-5.2.5′ since that was the version I was using.

After you change to the appropriate PHP directory you need to issue the configure command so you can recompile PHP with FreeType support. I used phpinfo() and looked at the Configure Command entry, removed the quotes and added the FreeType flags at the end.

./configure --with-apxs2 --with-curl --with-curl-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-gd --with-gd-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-gettext --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-kerberos --with-openssl --with-mcrypt --with-mhash --with-mysql=/usr --with-pear --with-png-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-xml --with-zlib --with-zlib-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-zip --enable-bcmath --enable-calendar --enable-ftp --enable-magic-quotes --enable-sockets --enable-track-vars --enable-mbstring --enable-memory-limit --with-freetype-dir=/usr/include/freetype2/ --with-freetype

Increasing the HTTP Upload Max Size

Edit php.ini

vi /usr/local/lib/php.ini

Scroll down and change the post_max_size. Mine was set to 8 and I upped it to 15 and the warning message went away.

post_max_size = 15M

I wanted to run it over SSL so I got a $13 SSL cert from Servertastic.com.

See it in action at https://help.isy-cpa.com.

So if you are looking for a nice looking and simple help desk solution that can be installed and configured in less than an hour and costs $0, Trellis Desk may be what you are looking for.