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Solving Error: Piwik is already installed

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Recently, I’ve been migrating sites to a new server. This included my Piwik installation for website statistics. In order to move Piwik I used mysqldump to backup the database, copied the sites files and restored them to a new server. When accessing Piwik for the first time after the migration I was greeted by the error:

Error: Piwik is already installed

Now, I know this is the only instance on my brand new server, and I know I restored the database correctly. I did some googling to find this is a common problem for migrating Piwik to a new server, but solutions proved to be lacking. In the end I moved the config.ini.php that contains the database connection to a backup location:

mv config/config.ini.php config/config.ini.php.old

I then re-ran the Piwik installation with the same details as I had in the original config file. This wiped my data, but after setup was finished I restored my backup from the original server again:

mysql -u root -p piwik < piwik.sql

Once I logged in all of my old data was available and Piwik was working again!

 

You may be interested in the following forum posts on the Piwik site:

Solving Debian 8 Jessie resolv.conf update issues

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With Debian Jessie, resolv.conf, which stores the name servers for the computer to use when looking up DNS requests, seems to automatically reset every so often. This results in the DNS lookup time for each request sent through the proxy to take longer if the name servers listed are not accurate or fast. For example, my resolv.conf file contained the following by default:

nameserver 192.168.0.1

The IP address listed is that of the router, which for some reason was taking an age to actually respond to requests. Originally I tried to edit this file by hand but it kept clearing itself back to default. This seems to be a particular issue in Debian Jessie.

To resolve the problem, I installed resolvconf, which is a program which has been designed to update the systems information about name servers.

apt-get install resolvconf

Once installed it’s easy enough to add the new name servers to the configuration file. I chose Google’s as a test, since they’re likely to be fast.

nano /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/head

In the file I added the two IP v4 name servers for google so that it looked like this:

# Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)
#     DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

Now that is in there, and of course you can change the name servers as you see fit, it’s just a case of running the update to resolvconf

resolvconf -u

Now your /etc/resolv.conf file should have your two lines prepended to it. Since the file works in top down priority your new requests will be sent to 8.8.8.8 by default. After implementing this Squid increased in speed significantly.

 

You may also be interested in reading alternative solutions on this particular thread at unix.stackexchagne.com.

 

 

AWSTATS on Debian generating lots of emails

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On Debian, when you install AWSTATS, it automatically adds a crontab to update the data every 10 minutes. If you’ve not configured your awstats config files correctly, every time the cronjob runs it will generate an error in /var/mail

In order to solve this, or have AWSTATS update on your own schedule simply edit the crontab file it installs to /etc/cron.d/awstats

You should find this line in the file:

*/10 * * * * www-data [ -x /usr/share/awstats/tools/update.sh ] && /usr/share/awstats/tools/update.sh

I commented it out with a “#”, incase I wanted to use it later. Alternatively you can delete the file or change the crontab to update whenever you want it to operate.

Fixing Slow SquirrelMail

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Fixing slow SquirrelMail version 1.4.15.

If you’ve got a large inbox and you’re using SquirrelMail to view it, you may notice page loading times are poor using the default configuration. There is a simple fix that will allow SquirrelMail to load emails using multiple threads and server sorting which means that the performance will improve significantly when accessing your email via a web browser.

Edit your config/config.php file:

nano /etc/squirrelmail/config.php

find the lines:


$allow_thread_sort = false;
$allow_server_sort = false;

and change them to:

$allow_thread_sort = true;
$allow_server_sort = true;

You need to restart your web server (assuming apache):


/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And then login to your web mail page. With any luck you’ll have noticed a significant performance boost. For further performance tuning information see the SquirrelMail website guide at: http://www.squirrelmail.org/docs/admin/admin-6.html