Experts in global web software development

Support

When you deal with PKR Internet, you deal directly with the experts.

In the examples below, substitute your domain name for "example.com".

System Status

Please see our system status page if you are a PKR customer experiencing problems with your service. Also, please feel free to contact us if you have problems of questions.

Support Quick Links

Contacting PKR

If you are a current PKR Internet customer experiencing trouble with your site, please contact us by email or by phone at +1 (703) 271-0607. We'll be glad to help you resolve whatever issues are outstanding.

Security Precautions

PKR Internet maintains high security standards on its servers. We will provide each person from your organization who needs access a separate account on our server. Each person you authorize must contact us by phone at +1 (703) 271-0607 to receive his or her account information and password. Please don't share account passwords with anyone else -- this is one way we maintain high security standards.

PKR Internet requires you to use secure login and file transfer protocols (SSH and SFTP/SCP), instead of using telnet and plain-old FTP. If you are not sure what SSH is or why it is preferable to the older protocols, please read our page about SSH. It includes information about why we require SSH and how to get an SSH client that will work on your computer.

We offer web mail and web file transfer through our SSL web server in case you can't use SSH or don't have an SSH client handy. When using these services, your password will remain encrypted as it goes over the Internet.

Using your account

The current host name of the shared server is "cauldron.pkrinternet.com". PKR Internet may move these sites to a new machine in the future; if we do that, we will notify you in advance about the move. We recommend that you use the domain name of the site you are maintaining when attempting to connect to the server for maintenance purposes instead of using the actual host name of the machine, however. Remember that you either need to use SSH (using an SCP or SFTP client) or our secure web file transfer application to add to or change these files.

Web Hosting

To get to the files for your domain, you will need to use either SSH (using an SCP or SFTP client) or our secure web file transfer application.

Use the domain name of your site when your file transfer client asks you for a host name.

The files for your web site are at this location on the filesystem: (replace 'www.example.com' with your domain name)

      /var/www/customer/www.example.com/htdocs/

You will need to either set that as the initial directory in your SCP client, or issue a command to your software changing the current directory to that path before manipulating your files

The web server log files for your domain are located on the filesystem at:

      /var/log/httpd/www.example.com-access_log
      /var/log/httpd/www.example.com-error_log

Please contact us if you would like to have a statistical analysis of the logs available on your site.

DNS Servers

If you are transferring an existing domain to PKR Internet, please use your DNS registrar's tools to change the domain name servers for the domain to these with your registrar:

DNS1.PKRINTERNET.COM
UDNS1.ULTRADNS.NET
UDNS2.ULTRADNS.NET

If you use Network Solutions as your registrar, please change the technical point of contact to "RB36", Richard Bullington-McGuire's identifier there.

Dynamic Content

PKR Internet offers all the standard languages commonly used for creating CGI programs on our web hosting server (Python, Perl, C, C++, etc.). We support both SSI and PHP4. SSI is enabled for .shtml pages, and the XBitHack option is turned on so you can enable SSI processing for any file extension (i.e. .htm or .html) on a per-file basis.

If you plan on using CGI programs on the server, please contact us so that we can enable a cgi-bin directory for your domain.

We use the suEXEC feature of Apache to allow you to run CGI scripts in a more secure fashion. If you are having difficulty getting a CGI script to work, please ensure that both the file and the directory it lives in are owned by you, and are not group writable.

Email Aliases

All of our web hosting packages include an unlimited number of email aliases. With an email alias, you can redirect mail sent to any address at your domain name to any email account, whether we host it or not.

You can provide us with a list of email addresses and their final destinations, and we will put those into place. For example,

      info@example.com: my-real-address@example.net

would redirect all email sent to the first address to the second.

If you don't provide us with a list of aliases, all email addressed to any address at your domain is set to go to the email account of the primary domain contact on our server. You can forward it to another account if you like by creating a ".forward" file in your home directory.

If you need more complex mail processing (by having "info@example.com" and "support@example.com" going to different addresses, for example), please contact us.

Email Client Setup

Although we offer web mail, you may prefer to use a desktop mail client to read your mail. We support both POP3S and IMAPS (the secure versions of POP3 and IMAP) for retrieving incoming mail. We do not support vanilla POP3 and IMAP, because these protocols send your password over the Internet in the clear (unencrypted). You can use PKR's SMTP server to send outgoing mail, as long as encryption and authentication are enabled in your mail client. You may also use your ISP's SMTP server for sending outgoing mail, but be warned that you may need to switch to PKR's SMTP server in the future, given the way anti-spam protections are evolving.

Mail Client Screenshots

Please see the more detailed instructions we've prepared for Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird.

General Email Client Setup Settings

If you are using another client, please these settings in your mail client:

POP3 Server Setting
Host Name mail.pkrinternet.com
Requires Secure Connection (SSL) yes
Port 995
From: address your-account-name@example.com
IMAP Server Setting
Host Name mail.pkrinternet.com
Requires Secure Connection (SSL) yes
Port 993
From: address your-account-name@example.com
IMAP Root Folder Path mail/
Sent Items path sent-mail
Draft path postponed-messages
SMTP Server Setting
Host Name mail.pkrinternet.com (or use your local ISP's SMTP server)
Port 25 (or 587 if your ISP blocks outgoing port 25)
Requires Secure Connection (SSL) yes

In most mail clients, you'll begin by configuring your email address (use your-account-name@example.com, substituting for your real account and domain name appropriately). You'll then need to tell the client about your email servers. Tell it to use mail.pkrinternet.com for either POP or IMAP for incoming mail, depending on whether you want mail to live on your local machine or on the server. Once you set up the initial server settings, you will need to poke around in the mail server settings in order to activate the secure connection.

Shell Account

We run a full-featured Linux-based server with shell accounts. You will need to use SSH to connect to cauldron.pkrinternet.com.

The truly old-school may use pine, mutt, or elm to read their mail directly on the server. The server has a full development environment, including C, C++, Perl, Python, PHP, Java, and more. If you are comfortable reading mail and creating web sites at the command line, this could be heaven for you. However, we don't allow extended disconnected use of the screen program or long-running customer daemon processes, and we reserve the right to kill any processes that are consuming too many system resources.

SSH Applet

We provide an SSH Applet that you can use to login remotely without having to install an SSH client on your computer.

Changing your Password

The easiest way to change your PKR Internet account password is through the web mail system. Sign on, go to the "Options" screen, then choose "Change Password". You'll be asked to verify your old password again, and to provide a new password.

You can also change your password by signing in using SSH and issuing the "passwd" command.

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