If your /boot partition is running out of disk space this is probably because you got bunch of old Linux kernels that got stockpiled there and are no longer in use or needed for system to function normally. If you’re running a WHM/cPanel you’ll get an email with subject: DISKWARN blocks: Mount Point “/boot”
Usually on a system update, if there is a new Linux Kernel it will get downloaded and initialized while the last one will be kept for just in case the first one fails for any reason. In couple of months or years you could already have 5-6 of them while only the latest Linux kernel would be in use and the previous one will be kept as a backup. Removing these by hand is possible but an mistake could end up with a system that won’t boot.
To prevent that and free up disk space at /boot partition on Red Hat Linux or CentOS Linux all you need to do is simply to execute this command:
sudo yum install yum-utils && sudo package-cleanup --oldkernels --count=2
This will remove all your old kernels keeping just the last two (latest one and the previous one just in case) so you won’t get these emails or notifications anymore and you’ll keep your /boot partition with enough free space for a new kernel to be installed once released.
So, this is actually the part 2 of my problems concerning DigitalOcean WordPress 1-click-app and JetPack (about the first issue you can read here). If you read my first post you found out what I had to do in order to activate the Jetpack. All seemed fine and I could see the stats from WordPress installed on DigitalOcean droplet on my WordPress.com account and even some of the active things were working (like Photon or Contact Form).
But, when I wanted to turn on some of the Jetpack modules that I have previously turned off (or that were turned off by default) it didn’t work. For example I wanted to turn off and then turn back on JSON API at General settings tab. When I turned it off it looked like it “worked” (no error messages) but when I wanted to turn it back on I was getting following error message (and the slider won’t go to active position):
JSON API failed to activate. SyntaxError: Unexpected toket < in JSON at position 0
When trying to activate some other Jetpack module I would also get this error:
SyntaxError: JSON Parse error: Unrecognized token ‘<‘” error
I was also unable to disconnect the Jetpack using the WordPress.com account and this was only possible if I would disable Jetpack at plugins and re-enable it again. Then I would have to re-connect it with my WordPress account and it’s a loop but the results were the same. It didn’t work!
I have contacted Jetpack support but their help was similar to Microsoft support (restart the computer and try again), or in Jetpack case: disable all plugins and try reconnecting again. Since Jetpack support was unable to help me after we have exchanged couple of emails I have decided to dig deeper into this on my own. DigitalOcean community also wasn’t helpful since I found just one comment about someone having the same problem as I do but there were no reply or solution.
So I have opened Chrome debugger and have noticed that when I try to activate the JSON API it actually tries to make a POST call to url: /wp-json/jetpack/v4/module/json-api/activate:
and the result is 404 – the standard 404 page! Since there files on that path and WordPress installation doesn’t have wp-json folder at all I figured out that this is mod_rewrite path so I knew in what direction to focus my exploration. I’d like to mention here that this also happened on brand new, zero days blogs, no plugins installed, default theme: basically on out of the box WordPress installations. Also permalinks worked so mod_rewrite was working normally (or it appeared to be working normally), and that made the situation even more confusing.
Out of pure despair I tried re-enabling mod_rewrite and restarting apache:
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo service apache2 restart
And it FU*KIN WORKED!!!
I have tired this on my other 5 or 6 sites hosted on DigitalOcean and it worked on all of them! I hope that some one from Jetpack or some geeks from DigitalOcean will see this post. I’d love to hear more about this issue. How is possible that mod_rewrite is working without being enabled on Apache or if it’s enabled why it doesn’t work for Jetpack plugin? I’m puzzled and I’d like some explanation.
Also I have one more bug that I don’t know how to solve. When I login to these WordPress admins I have this error on every (admin) page I load in my debugger:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property ‘type’ of undefined(…)
This traces back to https://widgets.wp.com/notifications/webpack:/webpack/bootstrap_905f… as you can see in detail on this screenshot:
Update: 05th December 2016
Now Jetpack is works normally on my DigitalOcean droplets, but on some occasions while setting up the Jetpack options I saw this message: Warning! Multibyte support missing!
This means that multi-byte support php module was not installed. To get it installed simply install package php-mbstring using apt-get (or yum in case you’re using CentOS/RHEL Linux), restart Apache and you’re good to go!
sudo apt-get install php-mbstring
sudo service apache2 restart
PHP multibyte should now be installed and these messages should no longer appear.
If you click on the image and hit the Align Center icon inside the editor, it will give to that image a class named “aligncenter” (or left “alignleft” and right to be “alignright” in case you align it left or right) and it will look good in the editor. In some cases once you save the changes and go to check how the image looks on the site you can notice that it’s not properly aligned and instead of being centered your image is right aligned.
This issue occurs on some themes while it works fine on the other (it works nice on the default WordPress theme) and the reason for that is that the theme doesn’t define these aligncenter (or alignleft and alignright) classes in CSS. These are introduced with WordPress 2.5 so some older themes are usually lack this and thus don’t work as expected.
There are some workarounds to solve this issue, but the best one is to just edit default styles.css and add the following css classes in it:
/* =WordPress Core
-------------------------------------------------------------- */
.alignnone {
margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}
.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin: 5px auto 5px auto;
}
.alignright {
float:right;
margin: 5px 0 20px 20px;
}
.alignleft {
float: left;
margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}
a img.alignright {
float: right;
margin: 5px 0 20px 20px;
}
a img.alignnone {
margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}
a img.alignleft {
float: left;
margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}
a img.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto
}
.wp-caption {
background: #fff;
border: 1px solid #f0f0f0;
max-width: 96%; /* Image does not overflow the content area */
padding: 5px 3px 10px;
text-align: center;
}
.wp-caption.alignnone {
margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}
.wp-caption.alignleft {
margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}
.wp-caption.alignright {
margin: 5px 0 20px 20px;
}
.wp-caption img {
border: 0 none;
height: auto;
margin: 0;
max-width: 98.5%;
padding: 0;
width: auto;
}
.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
margin: 0;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
}
/* Text meant only for screen readers. */
.screen-reader-text {
clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);
position: absolute !important;
height: 1px;
width: 1px;
overflow: hidden;
}
.screen-reader-text:focus {
background-color: #f1f1f1;
border-radius: 3px;
box-shadow: 0 0 2px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6);
clip: auto !important;
color: #21759b;
display: block;
font-size: 14px;
font-size: 0.875rem;
font-weight: bold;
height: auto;
left: 5px;
line-height: normal;
padding: 15px 23px 14px;
text-decoration: none;
top: 5px;
width: auto;
z-index: 100000; /* Above WP toolbar. */
}
You can add the code anywhere in the file, but the end of the file is probably your safe bet. Once you save the changes you can reload the site and your images should now be aligned same way as in your editor.
You made your WordPress blog using DigitalOcean 1-click apps, you have installed Jetpack WordPress plugin but you can’t activate. Instead you’re getting this message:
Error Details: The Jetpack server was unable to communicate with your site [HTTP 500]. Ask your web host if they allow connections from WordPress.com…
But the problem is not with the communication between WordPress.com and your DigitalOcean droplet. The problem is with the fact that following php modules were not installed: php7.0-xml and php7.0-xmlrpc.
No we can argue why these were not installed by default: it might be due the fact that this way WordPress XML-RPC will not function and this would automatically reduce the amounts of spam on your blog (more likely) or that that the system would perform (slightly) better without these two modules (less likely) but in order for JetPack to work we need to install these two modules and to restart the apache.
Here are the commands you need to execute in console in order for it to work:
sudo apt-get install php7.0-xml php7.0-xmlrpc
sudo service apache2 restart
After you have done this logout out of your WordPress, then login back again and try once again to connect your Jetpack plugin. I hope it will work out for you since it just did it for me on more than 10 different droplets!
Logging in to your DigitalOcean droplets is more secure if you use SSH keys compared to using root password. Today, I had to add my key to existing droplet (running over 3 years now) and to a droplet I have just created and setup everything on it but forgot to add a SSH Key to it. And just for the record I’m using Windows computer at the moment and the key is generated by PuttyGen. You should already have your SSH key pair: private and public SSH key before you proceed with this guide. I know that doing the same thing on Mac (or Linux) is much easier and all you would have to do is just execute one line of code in Terminal, but again I’m currently using Windows and this tutorial is intended for Windows users. Also note that this same guide will also work in case you have a dedicated server or a VPS at any other provider.
So, how do you add a SSH key after creating a droplet? I went to numerous replays on DO community but haven’t found the correct answer. To make this work first you need to open your favorite text editor: Notepad++, Sublime, Atom any of these editors is just fine (as long you don’t use MS Word). Now copy/paste your public key text in it.
So here is how a Public Key looks like:
---- BEGIN SSH2 PUBLIC KEY ----
Comment: "rsa-key-20161012
AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAAQEAkBUbfyu0amE+uld7dk9LJnJytmVf8qx4TBvT
0jCYKfNKJj2io8Jh3gB5Lyqhk2xMmPfthn2d/uRbIESmxN3DNE8NbD5Wubr0Q15i
ihAkn0qpxV8HodTONiwGP5GhFJqEe0ThHVa8w13oah/UYqH/a40/N/LaOaTcMaC/
V6hGQhCE+mCz5tmVsQm2CarNdWZffIYhHLDiSgd4DY609UKnA5LQAV1/cHK1FYVE
qiKISpoNZBJ8a0ZOn/a98fVqv7BnxHwvszDJ7Kwusx3ejJVDN2EykfT+SMXSjehX
Ly7ytRW8a7xSHwxa8yR+7lAcdgyrQryWUfBvDce1hdpk1M4sOQ==
---- END SSH2 PUBLIC KEY ----
Please note that this is not my actual public key and I have generated this one just for the purpose of creating this post. So it’s useless and don’t use it for anything.
Now you need to get rid of first two lines (—- BEGIN SSH2… and Comment …) and the last line (—- END SSH2…) and that will give us just our key but still that key is divided into 6 lines and we need it in one single line. So go now and make that a single line. If you don’t know how to do it in Notepad++ open Search and Replace by pressing CTRL+H and set search for \n, replace that with nothing, set search mode to Extended and click on Replace All. Here’s an screenshot to help you out with that:
The result should be a single line of code (if word wrapping is not turned on). Now before that just add rsa-ssh and one space after that word. The resulting key should look something like this:
rsa-ssh AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAAQEAkBUbfyu0amE+uld7dk9LJnJytmVf8qx4TBvT0jCYKfNKJj2io8Jh3gB5Lyqhk2xMmPfthn2d/uRbIESmxN3DNE8NbD5Wubr0Q15iihAkn0qpxV8HodTONiwGP5GhFJqEe0ThHVa8w13oah/UYqH/a40/N/LaOaTcMaC/V6hGQhCE+mCz5tmVsQm2CarNdWZffIYhHLDiSgd4DY609UKnA5LQAV1/cHK1FYVEqiKISpoNZBJ8a0ZOn/a98fVqv7BnxHwvszDJ7Kwusx3ejJVDN2EykfT+SMXSjehXLy7ytRW8a7xSHwxa8yR+7lAcdgyrQryWUfBvDce1hdpk1M4sOQ==
Now you need to copy that line of code into your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. The absolute path is /root/.ssh/authorized_keys and you can edit that in any editor you like and just add that line below existing lines (or replacing some of your old/previous keys). You need to save the changes and you’re done! Now you can login to your droplet or your webserver with your private SSH Key.
