Webmaster Tasks

Dec

18

2011

Logging PHP $_POST, $_FILES data for Debugging

PHP Development / Testing & Debugging / Webmaster Tasks  Posted by on December 18th, 2011 / 0 comments
debugging

Debugging is part and parcel of development and especially now applications getting complex with the advent of mobile apps development, developers need to log Form submitted $_POST and $_FILES data. Here’s a useful snippet to log the posted data that you can place in your PHP script to help you identify the problematic part.

Jut create the /logs/ directory along side the file where you include the code:

 
if ( isset($_POST) && is_array($_POST) && count($_POST) > 0 ) {
  $log_dir = dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/logs/';
  $log_name = "posts-" . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "-" . date("Y-m-d-H") . ".txt";
  $log_entry = gmdate('r') . "\t" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] . "\r\n" . serialize($_POST) . "\r\n\r\n";
  $fp=fopen( $log_dir . $log_name, 'a' );
  fputs($fp, $log_entry);
  fclose($fp); }
 
if ( isset($_FILES) && is_array($_FILES) && count($_FILES) > 0 ) {
  $log_dir = dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/logs/';
  $log_name = "posts-" . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "-" . date("Y-m-d-H") . ".txt";
  $log_entry = gmdate('r') . "\t" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] . "\r\n" . serialize($_FILES) . "\r\n\r\n";
  $fp=fopen( $log_dir . $log_name, 'a' );
  fputs($fp, $log_entry);
  fclose($fp); }

Hope that helps.

Sep

07

2011

Installing libphp2 for PHP over Joyent SmartMachine Server

Webmaster Tasks  Posted by on September 7th, 2011 / 0 comments
Tags:

On a Joyent server, I needed to install the libphp2 for PHP on SmartMachine so that WordPress can use SSH in your PHP code, but when I tried following command to install package, it gave followign error:

 
[root@server]# pecl channel-update pear.php.net
bash: pecl: command not found

This error can be resolved by doing following:

 
[user@server]# su -
Password:

Just make sure you do “su -”, so that a full environment gets initialized rather than just the . If you do just get a limited PATH if you do simple ‘su root’.

To install libphp2 for PHP on your joyent SmartMachine, do foloowing:

These commands should be run as root user:

 
[root@server]#pkgin in libssh2
[root@server]#pkgin in autoconf
 
[root@server]#pecl channel-update pear.php.net
[root@server]#pecl install -f ssh2

As a final step, you should add “extension=ssh2.so” to php.ini.

You can do that easily from your Webmin, just log in to Webmin and navigate to Webmin – Others – PHP Configuration – Edit Manually.

Hope that helps.

Cheers!

Aug

02

2011

Copying MySQL Database From One Server To Another Remote MySQL DB Server

Webmaster Tasks  Posted by on August 2nd, 2011 / 1 comments
Tags:

Copying MySQL databases from one server to other remote machine is task every webmaster has to do very often if not daily, and if your databases are huge, following command comes very handy to do this job without first downloading and then uploading the dump file.

Also, phpMyAdmin and other MySQL clients fail while importing big dump files due to timeout issues.

Following MySQL command basically pipes the data from mysqldump from one server directly into the other database instead of just dumping it into a file and then manually uploading it to the other server . ALso the uploading may stop if the file is too big.

The first host is FROM where you want to copy and destination is where you want to copy TO. Login to shell using SSH and run the following command by providing the DB name and DB user name and password of both servers.

 
mysqldump --opt --compress --user=USERHERE --password=PASSWORD.HERE --host=SOURCE.HOST.HERE.OR.localhost SOURCE_DB_NAME | mysql --user=USER.HERE --password=PASSWORD.HERE --host=DESTINATION.HOST.IP -D DESTINATION_DB_NAME -C DESTINATIONS_DB_NAME

You can also add number of other options in this above MySQL command from here.

You may get following error on running the command from shell.

 
ERROR 1130 (00000): Host 'x.x.x.x' is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server
mysqldump: Got errno 32 on write

If you get above error, you need to allow the dumping MySQL server IP in the destination server. In cPanel, you can easily do that from “Remote Database Access Hosts” manager. Just add the dumping Dsevrer Ip there and that will do the job.

Hope that helps.

Cheers!

Aug

01

2011

Error Uncompressing tar.gz file tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers

Webmaster Tasks  Posted by on August 1st, 2011 / 0 comments

For transferring one website from one server to another, I had to take the backup. usually this is not a big issue, but this time this machine was 64 bit Spark machine and the new server was a 32 bit GNU machine. While uncompressing, I got the following error:

 
root@server # tar -xvf file.tar.gz 
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

This error happens when you create the tar-ball on 64 bit Spark machine and then trying to untar on a 32 bit GNU machine, if this is the case then solution is following, you first need to first

 
gzip -d file.tar.gz
#and then do 
tar -xf file.tar

And it will extract without errors.

Hope that helps. Cheers!

Jul

05

2011

Redirecting Sub-Directories and All URLs Under it to the Root or to other Directory via htaccess

Webmaster Tasks  Posted by on July 5th, 2011 / 0 comments
Tags:

There are times when you want to change your website directory structure for the latest directory structure on the request of your SEO team or for some other reason, and using 301 redirects in apache’s .htaccess, this can be done very quickly and efficiently.

Here are some scenarios that I have encountered and used .htaccess redirects to good effect to get the desired result.

Redirect Sub-Directory and All URLs under it to Home Page

Open your root .htaccess file and place the following lines. It will redirect all URL requests under “directory-name” directory to the home page of your domain. Make sure you replace with the actual name of your website.

 
RewriteEngine On 
 
RewriteRule ^directory-name/.*$ http://www.domain.com/ [R=301,L]

Redirect Sub-Directory and All URLs under it to Some Other Directory

Open your root .htaccess file and place the following lines. It will redirect all URL requests under “directory-name” directory to the “new-directory” on your website. Make sure you replace with the actual name of your website with the domain.

 
RewriteEngine On 
 
RewriteRule ^directory-name/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/new-directory/$1 [R=301,L]

Hope that helps.

Cheers!

May

19

2011

Installing ffmpeg PHP Extension on Joyent Smart Machine Server

Webmaster Tasks  Posted by on May 19th, 2011 / 1 comments
Tags: |

For a Drupal based website to work properly, you need FFmpeg installed on server.

Before going any further, please note that FFmpeg and FFmpeg PHP extension are two different things (distinct software). While FFmpeg is available as a package on Joyent Smart Machine, however you’ll need to download the FFmpeg extension package from the http://ffmpeg-php.sourceforge.net/ and install it yourself.

Please also note that you do not need to install FFmpeg PHP Extension to make Drupal working for videos, FFmpeg command line will do the job for you. Check the Drupal documentation for configuring that.

You can easily check if the FFmpeg is installed or not on your Joyent Smart Machine by using:

 
[user@server ~]$ ffmpeg -version

If you see following (or similar) output, FFmpeg is installed on your Smart Machine server:

 
FFmpeg version SVN-r19146-snapshot, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
  configuration: --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-postproc --enable-libvorbis --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaad --disable-libopencore-amrnb --disable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libtheora --enable-libxvid --enable-libx264 --mandir=/opt/local/man --cc=gcc --prefix=/opt/local --disable-debug --disable-stripping --enable-shared --enable-pthreads --enable-gpl --disable-amd3dnow --disable-amd3dnowext --disable-mmx --disable-mmx2 --disable-sse --disable-ssse3
  libavutil     50. 3. 0 / 50. 3. 0
  libavcodec    52.30. 2 / 52.30. 2
  libavformat   52.34. 0 / 52.34. 0
  libavdevice   52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
  libavfilter    0. 5. 0 /  0. 5. 0
  libswscale     0. 7. 1 /  0. 7. 1
  libpostproc   51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
  built on Jul 13 2010 13:50:14, gcc: 4.4.2
FFmpeg SVN-r19146-snapshot
libavutil     50. 3. 0 / 50. 3. 0
libavcodec    52.30. 2 / 52.30. 2
libavformat   52.34. 0 / 52.34. 0
libavdevice   52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
libavfilter    0. 5. 0 /  0. 5. 0
libswscale     0. 7. 1 /  0. 7. 1
libpostproc   51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0

For installing ffmpeg PHP Extension on Joyent Smart Machine, use the following steps and commands.

Login to your Joyent server using SSH and do following:

First of all, make sure things are up to date:

type the following commands:

 
[user@server ~]$ pkgin up

It will show message

 
database for http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/2010Q2/All is up-to-date

Make sure ffmpeg is installed by running:

 
[user@server ~]$ sudo pkgin in ffmpeg
Password: provide yuor account password

You should see following output:

 
calculating dependencies for ffmpeg...
nothing to upgrade.
8 packages to be installed: libogg-1.2.0 xvidcore-1.2.2 x264-devel-20090920 libvorbis-1.3.1 libtheora-1.1.1nb1 lame-3.98.3 faad2-2.7nb1 ffmpeg-20090611nb8 (7995K to download, 21M to install)

When prompted, type ‘y’:

 
proceed ? [y/N] y

That should start downloading the above mentioned packages and install them. You will see following messages:

 
downloading packages...
downloading libogg-1.2.0.tgz: 100%
downloading xvidcore-1.2.2.tgz: 100%
downloading x264-devel-20090920.tgz: 100%
downloading libvorbis-1.3.1.tgz: 100%
downloading libtheora-1.1.1nb1.tgz: 100%
downloading lame-3.98.3.tgz: 100%
downloading faad2-2.7nb1.tgz: 100%
downloading ffmpeg-20090611nb8.tgz: 100%
installing packages...
installing libogg-1.2.0...
installing xvidcore-1.2.2...
installing x264-devel-20090920...
installing libvorbis-1.3.1...
installing libtheora-1.1.1nb1...
installing lame-3.98.3...
installing faad2-2.7nb1...
installing ffmpeg-20090611nb8...
ffmpeg-20090611nb8: copying /opt/local/share/examples/ffmpeg/ffserver.conf to /opt/local/etc/ffserver.conf
processing local summary...
updating database: 100%
marking ffmpeg-20090611nb8 as non auto-removable

Now, install autoconf using:

 
sudo pkgin in autoconf

Now, download the latest version of ffmpeg-php to your SmartMachine using:

 
curl -L -O http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffmpeg-php/files/ffmpeg-php/0.6.0/ffmpeg-php-0.6.0.tbz2

Now Uncompress it using:

 
gtar -xjf ffmpeg-php-0.6.0.tbz2

Now build and install it using:

 
cd ffmpeg-php-0.6.0
phpize
./configure && make
sudo make install

Now you need enable the extension by adding it to /opt/local/etc/php.ini. Open the file and after the list of extensions (extention=*) add following:

 
extension=ffmpeg.so to /opt/local/etc/php.ini

and save the file. Now restart Apache to enable it using:

 
svcadm restart apache

Hope that helps.

Cheers!

May

11

2011

Setting up osTicket Email Piping on Joyent Smart Machine Server

Webmaster Tasks  Posted by on May 11th, 2011 / 0 comments
Tags: |

Setting up osTicket on cPanel is easy and somewhat in Plesk as well, especially the email piping part as they have in depth articles on their wiki. But as soon as you try to set up email piping other than cPanel hosting and Plesk hosting environments, you are in the uncharted waters. Recently, I had to set up osTicket support system on Joyent Smart Machine server and this is how I got it done.

Inside Joyent Smart Machine hosting Admin Panel, you should be able to create mail aliases using Postfix Mail Server that will direct the e-mails to a /home/user-account/web/public/osTicket/api/pipe.php script.

Go to Virtualmin > Your Server > Postfix Mail Server > Edit Mail Aliases > Add an alias
and provide information for these following fields:

Description, Address(email), Enabled? Yes/No and Alias to select “Feed to program ..” from the drop-down, and in the space provided, provide full path to the osTicket mail piping script /home/user-account/web/public/osTicket-dir/api/pipe.php

Make sure that you set the executable permissions (chmod 755) on pipe.php otherwise it might not run.

Also, If you were to make the directories leading up to your script executable, you could also rule out permission issue by something like:

 
chmod +x /home/user-account/web/public/osTicket-dir/api/

Hope that helps.

Cheers!

Feb

16

2011

[MySQL] Enabling MySQL Query Cache to Speed Up Query Performance

PHP Development / Webmaster Tasks  Posted by on February 16th, 2011 / 0 comments
Tags:

If you ever have managed some website/portal that has any meaningful traffic, you already know what can it do to your MySQL server performance if you don’t optimise your queries and enable php server side caching. One of the things that you can do at DB level is to enable mysql_query_cache to speed up DB performance.

A Good or not so good thing about mysql_query_cache is that the cache expires automatically once the table is modified (inserts, updates, delete, etc). If there are these operations are veing performed in every table in your website, it might not help much but it can’t harm your website either so go ahead and just enable the cache and see what difference it makes.

How to Enable mysql_query_cache

To enable mysql_query_cache, you need to edit your my.cnf and set query_cache_type to 1, and set the query_cache_size to some value. This is set it to 64Mb in the following example. Default MySQL location for this file is /etc/my.cnf on your Linux server.

How to Check if mysql_query_cache is Enabled Already

 
mysql> show variables like 'query%';

You will see something like this:

 
+------------------------------+---------+
| Variable_name                | Value   |
+------------------------------+---------+
| query_alloc_block_size       | 8192    |
| query_cache_limit            | 1048576 |
| query_cache_min_res_unit     | 4096    |
| query_cache_size             | 67108864|
| query_cache_type             | ON      |
| query_cache_wlock_invalidate | OFF     |
| query_prealloc_size          | 8192    |
+------------------------------+---------+

Please give special attention to query_cache_type variable which should be set to ON after making my.cnf changes, the query_cache_size variable should not be set to zero. Zero value means your query cache is practically disabled since it has no memory at its disposal to use.

When Enabling mysql_query_cache Can Help Most

Following are conditions which can best exploit the benefits of the MySQL query cache, although the query cache can be effective in most situations, but it will help greatly in following cases:

  1. Identical queries are issued by the same or multiple clients on a repetitive basis.
  2. The underlying data being accessed is static or semi-static in nature.
  3. Queries have the potential to be resource-intensive and/or build brief, but complexly computed result sets.

Hope that helps.

Cheers!

Jan

31

2011

BitNami Redmine Stack Installation on Linux

Project Management / Webmaster Tasks  Posted by on January 31st, 2011 / 0 comments
Tags: |

Redmine is a mature and very good project management web application using Ruby on Rails framework. Since it requires specific Rails and Ruby Gems versions, Installing and configuring Redmine is not child’s play.

One option of setting up Redmine is by downloading the latest stable release from http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/Download Since Apache, MySQL and Ruby are usually already installed on servers, this is good option for those who have server resources and can manage server tweaking and capability to install Gems and upgrade Rails version and other dependencies if required.

But most people might not want to go this route considering administering Linux server is not everybody’s forte. There’s another easier method of setting up Redmine and that’s using BitNami Redmine Stack.

BitNami Redmine Stack greatly simplifies the deployment of Redmine and its required dependencies. It can be deployed using a native installer or in the cloud.

BitNami native installers automate the setup of a BitNami application stack on your server. This installer includes all of the software necessary to run out of the box. It’s like everyday software installation routine of clicking through Next-Next-Next. The only difference is that in this case you have to type some commands.

BitNami stacks are completely self-contained and will not interfere with other software on your system. BitNami Redmine stack installs the complete bundle with all the Redmine dependencies such as Apache, Ruby, Rails, Gems, MySQL, Subversion (SVN), ImageMagic etc.

You can download current BitNami Redmine Stack from here.

Log in to your Linux server using SSH and download this file by typing wget command:

 
$ wget http://bitnami.org/files/stacks/redmine/1.1.0-0/bitnami-redmine-1.1.0-0-linux-installer.bin

On Linux, you will need to give it executable permissions. Once downloaded, you can change permissions on this installer and then begin the installation process, invoke it from shell:

 
$ chmod +x bitnami-redmine-1.1.0-0-linux-installer.bin
$ ./bitnami-redmine-1.1.0-0-linux-installer.bin

It will ask you to choose the installation directory. If the destination directory does not exist, it will be created as part of the installation. Also the default listening port for Apache is 8080, for MySQL is 3006, for Subversion is 3690 and for Mongrel cluster are 3001 and 3002. If those ports are already in use by other applications, you will be prompted for alternate ports to use.

The next step will ask you you to create the initial admin user:

Username and password: You will use this information to login into the administrative part of Redmine. The password you provide here will also be used to protect other parts of the installation.

Real name: The name that will be displayed in the application.

Email address: Your email address.

You can select the language to load the default data into the next page.

The next step will ask you email address to send emails:

SMTP Address: The address of SMTP server.

SMTP Hostname: The name of SMTP server.

SMTP Port: The port of SMTP server.

SMTP Username and Password: User and password to SMTP server.

If you donot encounter any errors, you will see the message that installation process has been completed.

Hope that helps.

Cheers!

Jan

29

2011

Enabling gzip, deflate compression on your website on apache via .htaccess

Webmaster Tasks  Posted by on January 29th, 2011 / 3 comments
Tags:

Compressing your website files, especially the text files, with mod_gzip or mod_deflate on Apache not only save heaps of network bandwidth, but also speed up downloading your website up to 70%.

Most web servers can compress hosted website files in gzip format before sending them for download. To enable compression, configure your web server to set the Content-Encoding header to gzip format for all textual resources.

Almost all modern browsers support data compression for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. This allows web servers to send data over the network in compressed form and help in reducing lot of network traffic and download time.

Apart from the gzip compression, you can also use deflate. Here’s a sample code that you can place in the .htaccess file at root of your website:

Enable file compression using mod_gzip

 
<IfModule mod_gzip.c>
    mod_gzip_on       Yes
    mod_gzip_dechunk  Yes
    mod_gzip_item_include file      \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
    mod_gzip_item_include handler   ^cgi-script$
    mod_gzip_item_include mime      ^text/.*
    mod_gzip_item_include mime      ^application/x-javascript.*
    mod_gzip_item_exclude mime      ^image/.*
    mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</IfModule>

Enable file compression using mod_deflate

 
<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript
</ifmodule>

There are few caveats here. Compression needs processor usage and compressing media files is not recommended for following reasons:

  1. Usually media files are already optimized and there is not much to gain by compressing them.
  2. Media files such as mp3s, videos, images etc. are much larger in size and hence require more processor power out weighing the benefits of compressing them.

Check and Confirm Your Compression

Once you have added code in the .htaccess on your server, check it to make sure it’s actually serving up compressed files. you can verify it in several ways:

  1. Use the online gzip tool to check if your web page is compressed or not.
  2. You can install Google PageSpeed Firefox Addon and see whether your web page is compressed or not.

Hope that helps.

Cheers!