Category: Software
April 23rd, 2018 by ronny
Teamspeak vs Ventrilo was the question for several years in the past. The answer? The thing is that is not just Teamspeak and Ventrilo on the market anymore. Mumble was one of the first to come along, as open source, for free for anyone who could host a server. And now several years later many more are fighting for your voice over IP.
Ventrilo was believed to die a few years ago. Since 2014 no one heard anything from them. No new versions of the VoIP software. No more updates. Then in 2017, as a shock, a brand new version of Ventrilo came. Version 4 came on the market, as Discord was becoming increasingly popular. Stirring up the battle about Teamspeak vs Ventrilo.
Teamspeak has its history too. The first public version of Teamspeak came out in 2001. That is at the moment 17 years ago, many gamers are younger than that. Ventrilo came out the year after, in 2002. And younger VoIP applications have died. Mohawk Voice came out in 2009, only for Windows (at least on the server side) and pretty much died 5-6 years later. Some users even went on Skype?!?!
Teamspeak vs Ventrilo
Ventrilo version 3 allowed users to download and install their own server. Without any license, you could run an 8 slot Ventrilo server. Probably enough for most friendly online battles. Teamspeak, on the other hand, allowed a server without a license to run with 32 slots. Could probably be enough for many clans out there. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be any Ventrilo server available for download now. At least not on their own webpage. Did they gave up on Teamspeak vs Ventrilo.
Ease to use. Both Teamspeak and Ventrilo are relatively easy to use. Teamspeak offers an overlay on top of your game. So you can see who is online, who is talking and so on. No such features are known for Ventrilo.
I can not find a single point where Ventrilo will be better than Teamspeak. If you know of any, let me know in the comment field and I will update the article.
Other competitors who died
It is not only Teamspeak vs Ventrilo out there. Several other software died in the battle for VoIP Domination.
Roger Wilco came out in 1999 and only lasted a few years. They claimed to have 5 million users just before they died in 2003. That is when their last version came out.
Mohawk Voice was one of the last competitors who released a software. They came out first in 2010 and lasted until 2015. Their website is down and no one ever saw version 1.2 of Mohawk Voice.
Xfire came out in 2003 for the first time. They officially discontinued their VoIP software in 2015. One of their more popular features was the ability to record your gameplay for uploading to YouTube and other Video sites. Fun fact, Viacom bought Xfire in 2006 for $102 million.
Competitors still alive
Other companies and VoIP competitors survived the Teamspeak vs Ventrilo fight. Here are the most known software.
Mumble released for the first time in 2005. Last stable release in 2017. Their website is still up and both their client and server software available for download across several platforms.
Skype came out in 2003. Bought by eBay in 2005 and bought again by Microsoft in 2011. Still alive and kicking. But as the gamers say, only noobs use Skype as VoIP. Offers nothing to gamers other than voice and video chat and some sharing functions.
Discord was released in 2015 and is one of the latest competitors and the VoIP software that has stolen most users from all the others VoIP software. Discord uses a centralized server farm, unable to self-host. They have also monetized the software with customization options where you pay a monthly subscription to have animated avatars and stuff like that.
Check out Ventrilo.
Check out Teamspeak.
If you liked the Teamspeak vs Ventrilo article, check out my Alternatives to Teamspeak for gamers and other users article.
Posted in Servers, Software, Teamspeak Tagged with: teamspeak, Ventrilo
March 26th, 2018 by ronny
If you are locked out of WordPress admin panel, what to do or find out what to do. I will list some of the symptoms and solutions to commons issues why users get locked out of WordPress admin panel. Hopefully, you will never have to read this. Let us see what are the most common issues why you might get locked out of WordPress. What to do when locked out of WordPress?
Locked out of WordPress: Wrong password
Locked out of WordPress because of the password is one of the most common reasons why you can’t login to your WordPress admin panel is that you use the wrong password. You can always click the “lost your password?” link and get your password reset. This requires a few things. You registered your email when you created your WordPress account. Your Sendmail, if you are on Linux or some sort of SMTP server for your WordPress to be able to send that reset mail.
If the mail for some reason doesn’t work, you will need to go into your MySQL database and reset your password there. The best way to reset your password in the database is to use a tool like phpMyAdmin or MySQL Workbench. If you have SSH access to the database server you can also use terminal and access the database that way. I bit more complicated, but there are tons of tutorials on the matter.
Admin Privileges is gone
How to access WordPress admin tools when your admin privileges are missing? This is fortunately not as common as wrong or lost password issue. There are only a few ways this could happen. Either someone removed your admin privileges or something changed the settings for the admin user in the database itself. Either way, you should have a backup of your WordPress installation, including the database.
If you connect to your database with a tool like MySQL Workbench you can manually check what privileges your user has. Check out the table wp_usermeta, and you will find the privileges for all your users in here. Then we look at the main admin user, the first user created in WordPress. It should have a key value for wp_capabilities like this: a:1:{s:13:”administrator”;b:1;}
If the value above is something different. Like something like this: a:0:{}. That means all your roles have been removed. You are not even a subscriber. So how to login to WordPress again? You can copy the wp_capabailities from the admin code above, and past it into your own user. Then maybe think of how to prevent it from happening again.
Blank admin page (White screen of death)
A blank WordPress admin page, or the white screen of death, can happen after doing changes to your WordPress. You enter the WordPress administration URL, and you only get a white screen. It can be compatibility issues in a plugin, bad plugin update or other plugin issues. The more plugins you have, the higher the chance of something like this to happen. But luckily it can be fixed and help you from being locked out of WordPress.
The most common solution to this issue can be solved by disabling all the plugins. Then turn them back on one by one until you identified the faulty plugin. You can read more about that in my article about white screen of death. One of the most common causes of being locked out of WordPress.
Syntax error or PHP error messages
PHP error messages usually come when editing your theme. Unless you are testing your own made plugins or something. But for non-developers theme snippets or changes to the theme is the main cause. This error will not just cause the admin panel to be unavailable, but most likely your entire site. Syntax errors or PHP errors is easiest fixed by connecting the site with FTP. And then manually change or remove the theme. This guy has an article on how to monitor PHP error messages for WordPress.
Error establishing a database connection
Error establishing a database connection message is because your WordPress cannot connect to your database. This message will often not appear only on your admin panel. It will often appear on your entire WordPress site. But that can be a good thing, compared to the alternatives. There are a few things that can cause this error message.
The database server could be down. Are you using a shared web hosting or hosting your own server? If you are using shared web hosting I would contact the hosting company and asked them if the database server was down. Or maybe they even have status messages on their website. Some hosting companies do.
The database could be damaged and needs to be repaired. You can have WordPress trying to repair the database by itself. However, you need to do one change in the wp-config.php file. But only one line of code is needed at the end of the file. Or almost at the end. Just above this line: /* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */ You can try to paste this code in: define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);
While you are at it with the wp-config file, check the database connection information at the top of the file. You will find the database name, database username, database password and database server address.
Make Backups
The most important thing with running WordPress sites, or any other sites, is to make regular backups. Start doing that before you have to google wp-login not working or how to access my WordPress dashboard. There are tons of backup plugins you can use to make backups. Or even restore your site if needed. Backup plugins are also a nice way to transfer your WordPress site to another host. If you like the same WordPress site running on a home server for testing and experimenting.
Hope you don’t get locked out of WordPress again. Check out my other WordPress articles here.
Posted in Wordpress Tagged with: Locked out, Wordpress
March 24th, 2018 by ronny
Change link color WordPress. Sometimes your WordPress default link colors don’t fit very well on your page. There isn’t any settings where you can change this in a lot of the themes. For some themes, the link color is the same as the text color. So it is impossible to see any links in your articles. And we want to see the WordPress link!!! Get ready to change link color WordPress.
Change link color WordPress
Step 1
The first thing you need to do is, of course, open your dashboard for your WordPress. When your dashboard has opened, go to Appearance -> Customize. This is the place where you can customize the look and appearance of your entire site. But not set link color, there are no options for WordPress font color or anything without using CSS.
Step 2
At the very bottom of the menu, you’ll see Additional CSS. Click that one and a new window appear. In this window, you can do all the changes you cant find options for. As long as it has something with the formatting of your pages. Things like WordPress Hyperlink color code, WordPress text color code, line spacing and things like that.
Step 3
With the CSS editor open, you can paste in the code below. The first line tells WordPress to do these changes to any WordPress link. The second line is the color of the link. In this example we use black. The third line tells WordPress that you want the hyperlinks underlined. This is how to change link color in CSS for WordPress.
.single .entry-content p a {
color: #000000;
text-decoration: underline;
}
When working with CSS link color or web pages in general, you sometimes need color codes. Wikipedia has a great article on web colors.
And if you need to find those color codes or a color picker. Just open opp Google and type in color picker in the search field. And integrated color picker tool will appear. Great work Google for integrating all those tools directly into your search page.
If you liked my Change link color WordPress article, please check out my other WordPress articles here.
Posted in Wordpress Tagged with: Change Link Color, Wordpress
March 11th, 2018 by ronny
Fatal error out of memory WordPress is caused by, as the message says, out of memory. WordPress itself is not memory hungry. According to WordPress memory requirements, 32MB is enough to run WordPress. In most cases with a decent amount of plugins, 128MB is more than enough. The default memory_limit in wp-setting.php is 128MB if you have a newer WordPress installation.
Fatal error out of memory WordPress
A WordPress out of memory is usually easy enough to fix. That is if you know your WordPress is out of memory. Fatal error out of memory WordPress is not given an error message every time. Sometimes you can experience whats called White screen of death. No error messages, no warning, no nothing. If you get a white screen of death it is often after trying to access the WordPress Admin page. Check out my WordPress admin blank page after login on how to solve that.
How to increase WordPress memory limit?
In the beginning of /wp-includes/default-constants.php 40MB is allocated to WordPress. Or 64MB if it is multisite. So if you need more than that, you should in the default-constants.php allocate more than the default value. If you feel like your site need 128MB, change the code to this: define( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘128M’ );
Please note that some WordPress hosts, or shared web hosting only allocate 8MB to php. If you are using a VPS, dedicated server or a web host with access to the WordPress setting files, try the change above to increase php memory.
Check php memory usage
If you want to check php memory usage or how much memory your WordPress site is using, check out Server IP & Memory Usage Display. After installing the plugin, just go to your admin page and scroll down to the bottom. Really useful when debugging your memory needs for your site. You will see your php memory size and Php memory limit WordPress IP address and your php and OS version.
If you liked this fatal error out of memory WordPress article, please check out my other WordPress articles.
Posted in Wordpress Tagged with: Fatal error, Out of memory, Wordpress
WordPress admin blank page after login, the first time is terrifying. Since you found this article, I guess that is what you are experiencing now. If not, keep this article for later if you are a WordPress user. Chances are you will experience it if you manage your own WordPress install. Installing and setting up plugins, themes and etc.
What happened to me was everything else was working just fine. The plugins seemed to do what they were supposed to do, and the theme worked just fine. Everything worked, except WordPress admin blank page after login. Nothing appeared when trying to login to the admin panel. Not even an error message, just a completely blank page. It can, of course, behave differently on other sites. This was just how my WordPress blank page experience was. I had to read several articles to fix my issue. And here is what I found.
Before you do anything, take a backup
1. The most important thing I learned from my WordPress admin blank page after login experience is to always keep an up to date backup of your site. There are several plugins that will help you with backups. The plugin I use for backups is UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore. But there are a whole bunch of them. Probably better than the one I use too.
2. After you have done a backup, download it and save it somewhere safe.
3. If you have a spare computer or already set up, you can have a web server at home. With the same version of WordPress, same template, and same plugins. Then before updating your live server, you can verify the updates on your test server at home.
Identify the error causing the blank page
What causes WordPress admin blank page after login? It can be tricky to locate what the error is. If you have a WordPress hosting, you could ask the hosting company if there any known faults. If you have multiple WordPress blogs, check to see how the others are doing. The same error there? A test server is also handy to have in this situation.
If you are familiar with PHP or a Google ninja, some output would be better than a blank page. There is something you can do to make it print errors and warnings. If you edit the wp-config.php and add the following code:
error_reporting(E_ALL); ini_set(‘display_errors’, 1);
define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, true);
What can cause WordPress admin blank page after login
1. One of the most common reasons why your admin page goes blank is because PHP is out of memory. Increasing PHP memory limit will solve the admin page from going blank. You can read more about how to increase the PHP memory for WordPress.
2. Bad plugins is another common reason why your WordPress blog stops working. This was the reason why my WordPress admin page went white. How I fixed it was to disable all the plugins at once. Not sure how to do that. Check. out my article on Disable all plugin for WordPress. And then enable them one after one, until you find the plugin causing the error.
3. Before doing this, make sure you have a good backup of your WordPress blog. It could be your theme. The best way to test this is to use the default WordPress theme. If you have access to the installation directory, just navigate to the theme folder and delete it. This will force WordPress to load the default WordPress theme.
4. An unlikely cause, but could of course happen, is that one or more of the core files have been damaged. You can do a reinstall of WordPress to verify this. You will not lose your data. They are stored in a MySQL database. You will need to configure it again, move the theme over and reinstall the plugins. Should be last resort. And not installed over the old WordPress installation if it can be avoided.
Please also read Debian – Install WPScan to scan WordPress for vulnerabilities
Posted in Wordpress Tagged with: Admin Blank Page, Wordpress
December 2nd, 2017 by ronny
Disable all plugins WordPress if you can’t access the admin panel. If you experience a white screen of death, or for other reasons can’t log in to the admin panel, chances are some of the plugins have failed and crashed your admin panel. However, if you have access to FTP or the files through some web interface it should be easy to repair.
Disable all plugins WordPress – using FTP
As mentioned above you can use an FTP client or some sort of file manager via your web host. If you don’t have access to the WordPress files in any way, this method will not work for you. You will have to try to do it via the database instead. If you have SSH access that should work too. You could just use a file manager like Midnight Commander (MC), or even terminal commands.
After connected to the server with your FTP client or file manager, browse to your WordPress directory. Inside wp-content, you will find a directory called plugins. Now you will rename plugins directory to plugins.deactivate (it can be named anything other than plugins, but this name will make sense). Now all your WordPress plugins are disabled.
Log into Admin panel. If you go to the plugins area all plugins should be gone. Now without doing anything other than log into the admin panel, rename plugins.deactivate back to plugins. If you refresh your plugins area in admin panel all plugins should now be back, but they will all be disabled. Now you can activate the plugins again, one at the time. This way you should be able to notice which plugins that are crashing the admin panel.
Vulnerabilities
If you are worried there might be vulnerabilities in your WordPress install, you should check out WPScan. Check out my articles Debian – Install WPScan to scan WordPress for vulnerabilities, on how to install and use WPScan.
Remember you can always get the latest WordPress installation files at wordpress.org
That is Disable all plugins WordPress. Enjoy!
Posted in Wordpress Tagged with: Disable Wordpress plugins
November 30th, 2014 by ronny
Here is how to connect to your sftp account with FileZilla using RSA certificate. You will need to refer to my previous article if you haven’t already created the certificate. The link to Debian/Ubuntu – Use RSA certificate with Putty. After you have created the certificate, you can continue on this article. After you have created the certificate, it doesn’t take much to setup FileZilla.
In FileZilla go to Edit -> Settings. In the settings window, select SFTP. Then select Add Keyfile, and select the private ppk file you made with the Puttygen tool as shown in previous article. You are now ready to connect to your server. So to connect to my test server, I type in sftp://192.168.1.103, and ronny as username and connect.
And thats it, happy uploading!
Posted in Linux, Software, Windows
November 11th, 2013 by ronny
Here is a tool that can upload files to a ftp host with interval ranging from 1 second to almost infinite. It will not run on Win XP (XP is outdated and should be replaced). It require .net framework 3.5, and to be run on vista, server 2008 or newer. It is a 32bit software, and will run on both 32bit and 64bit computers. Check out the download page for FtpUploader for download link and more information.
Edit: It will run on XP, but will have to be installed manually without using the Installer.
Posted in Software, Windows
