MAMP MySQL won’t start

If you use MAMP for local PHP/MySQL development on OS X then you’re likely to come across this problem with MySQL starting once in a while.

MAMP is a great bit of software but every now and then you will see that MySQL has a problem starting. Checking PHPMyAdmin you might see “Error: Could not connect to MySQL server!”.

Don’t despair, there is a very quick fix:

1. Quit MAMP
2. Open terminal and type: sudo killall -9 mysqld
3. Reopen MAMP

That will fix it but if it’s still not working you can try visiting this MAMP forum thread for more details.

SQL command to reset WordPress password

The quickest and easiest way to change your WordPress admin password. Just enter this SQL command directly on your server.

UPDATE wp_users SET user_pass = MD5('newpassword') WHERE user_login = "admin";

Zimbra mail suddenly stopped working

After a couple of days with no mail I decided that something must be wrong. A quick check of the logs showed a problem.

I tailed the log file while I sent myself an email from another account:

tail -f /var/log/mail.log

The mail tried to be delivered but there was an error occurring:

127.0.0.1[127.0.0.1]:10024: Connection refused

It seems the Zimbra mailserver was not accepting connections. This was easily resolved with a quick restart.

zmcontrol stop

zmcontrol start

Moving mail to Zimbra server using imapsync

If you attempt moving mail using imapsync to a Zimbra server, the first error you are likely to get is:

Host mydomain.com says it has NO CAPABILITY for AUTHENTICATE CRAM-MD5

You can fix this quite quickly by adding –noauthmd5

So, that’s fixed but Zimbra still isn’t going to let you connect. You’ll get another error that says:

Error login: [mydomain.com] with user [user@mydomain.com] auth [LOGIN]: 2 NO cleartext logins disabled

To fix this one you need to enable clear text logins on the Zimbra admin panel. There’s a checkbox under the IMAP section of Server Settings. Except it’s greyed out and doesn’t work.

What you actually need to do is logon to your server, make sure you are running as the Zimbra user (su zimbra) and then execute the following command:

zmprov mcf zimbraImapCleartextLoginEnabled TRUE

Done. Run imapsync again it hopefully it will work.