Troubleshooting

mysqldump: Got error: 2008: MySQL client run out of memory when retrieving data from server

I came across this error today while at work. While trying to process a MySQL dump of a database of approximately 8 GB in size, I got the following error:
mysqldump: Got error: 2008: MySQL client run out of memory when retrieving data from server
This occurred on a MySQL 4.1 server. To get around this, you will need to use the -q switch as part of your mysqldump command.

This option is useful for dumping large tables. It forces mysqldump to retrieve rows for a table from the server a row at a time rather than retrieving the entire row set and buffering it in memory before writing it out.

(source: MySQL :: MySQL 3.23, 4.0, 4.1 Reference Manual :: 4.5.4 mysqldump — A Database Backup Program)

Your full command should look something like this:
$ mysqldump -u user -p password -q database > outfile.sql

How to fix a ‘403 Forbidden’ error on your website

So you’re working on your website and you go to test it and you get a big nasty message that says something to the effect of
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.

What did you do? Better yet, what do you do.
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How to fix a broken WordPress RSS feed

Looking over my analytics for my blog the last couple days, I’ve noticed I have got a couple of referral visits from my web design company website. I added a FeedBurner widget to the front of that site highlighting my 5 most recent blog posts. Out of curiosity, I was browsing on that website and notice the Widget stated “Watch this space for future items!” Well that was just weird to me since I post every day. Upon further research, FeedBurner was showing an error “There is an issue that must be addressed with your source feed for the feed”. When I went to my actual feed URL, I got the following error:

XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
Location: http://www.poundbangwhack.com/feed/
Line Number 2, Column 1:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
^

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2 SUREFIRE ways to test if your email is working

We’ve all ran into those problems where all of our sudden, we can’t send email and we don’t know why, and don’t know what to do, besides call our email provider. One thing I’ve been focusing on at work lately is empowering our customers to “take ownership” of their servers, to help them figure things out on their own. The way I put it, being a server administrator is like getting married; “through good times and bad.” The problem is most administrators (or wannabe administrators) only want to be the admin when the server is running. Once there’s a problem, they expect us to be the admin. Sorry folks, but that’s not how it works.
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