According to the documentation the following command is what it takes to install:

pecl install apc

However, then I tried this I quickly received an error stating “phpize: command not found”. So after a little searching I discovered that I needed to install php-devel.i386 to enable pear to install packages. (You may also need to install autoconf, automake and libtool to do phpize. I must have already had them installed.)

sudo yum install php-devel.i386

Note: I used sudo, but you can also use su to change to the root user and then run the command as root.

Now after installing that, which also installed a couple of dependencies and updated a couple of other applications, I figured I would be all set. To the contrary I tried the install apc command again and I received one prompt asking:

Use apxs to set compile flags (if using APC with Apache)? [yes]:

I received a new error after answering “yes” :

Sorry, I was not able to successfully run APXS.  Possible reasons:
 
1.  Perl is not installed;
2.  Apache was not compiled with DSO support (--enable-module=so);
3.  'apxs' is not in your path.  Try to use --with-apxs=/path/to/apxs
The output of apxs follows
/tmp/tmpArfGXr/APC-3.0.10/configure: line 3196: apxs: command not found
configure: error: Aborting
ERROR: `/tmp/tmpArfGXr/APC-3.0.10/configure --enable-apc-mmap=yes
--with-apxs' failed

After a few minutes of searching I found a post somewhere that informed me that httpd-devel.i386 also needed to be installed.

sudo yum install httpd-devel.i386

Once the package installed, along with a few more dependencies and updates, I was then ready to try again. This time all went well, and APC was installed.

One final step was to activate it in the php.ini file. I added the following:

extension=apc.so
apc.enabled = On

Next I was ready to restart Apache and see APC in action:

sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart

After creating a quick phpinfo() call I could now see that the APC module was indeed active. Once I copied the apc.php file that comes with the APC install files into a web accessible directory (preferably password protected) I was clearly able to see stats associated with APC.

There is much more you can do with APC settings, etc. However, that is another story for another time. Here are a couple of links to help get you started though.
C7y Tutorial
Pecl page

“The gateway no longer supports the requested method of integration.”

While doing some digging I found that they were using a very old web submit method that Authorize.Net no longer supported. There were two ways to fix the problem:

1. Change to AIM method of submission, which required an SSL certificate that the client did not have.
2. Change to SIM method of submission, which required either PHP 5.1.2 installed to use the hash_hmac function, or for PHP 4.3.9 it required that mhash be installed on the server.

Since the client did not want to spend the extra cash for the SSL certificate, and I could not install PHP 5.1.2 because I had too many other clients on the server that were not ready for the upgrade, I decided to do some searching for a way to install mhash.

It turned out that the Red Hat repositories did not carry php-mhash for RHEL 4, so this meant I needed to look in other areas. After reading many different blog and BB postings saying that it required an install, then a recompile of PHP I started to get a little worried. I did not look forward to recompiling PHP.

Finally I found some posts that brought a ray of hope. There are RPMs available to install php-mhash without the PHP recompile, but it required that libmhash be installed first. Here are the steps I followed:

• I went to http://dag.wieers.com/packages/libmhash/ and downloaded the newest version of libmhash for my server.
• Then I installed using the following to satisfy dependencies of mhash:

  rpm -iv libmhash-0.9.1-1.rhel3.dag.i386.rpm

• Next I downloaded the php-mhash by using:

  wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/sourceforge/p/ph/phprpms/php-mhash-4.3.2-19.ent.2.i386.rpm

• I followed that by installing it using:

  rpm -iv php-mhash-4.3.2-19.ent.2.i386.rpm

After following those steps I created a phpinfo script to see that everything went well:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

I could now plainly see that mhash was installed perfectly, and with further tests I confirmed it was working.

First I had to install the ccd2iso package via Synaptic package manager, or I could have used ’sudo apt install ccd2iso’.

After installing this I could simply run the following command from terminal:

ccd2iso myfile.img myfile.iso

The same methods can be used for other image type files:
mdf2iso -> myfile.mdf
nrg2iso -> myfile.nrg

Now I have a regular iso file that can be used to serve our purposes by burning to disk or mounting:

sudo mount -o loop myfile.iso mountname
 
or
 
sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 myfile.iso mountname

The .nrg files can also be mounted in this manner without converting to ISO by using:

sudo mount -o loop,offset=307200 myfile.nrg mountname

NOTE: if this doesn’t work and you get an error like: “Unrecognized sector mode (0) at sector 0!” it may be due to the limitations of the ccd2iso. In my case the MS Office disk had multiple sessions, and I could not convert it to ISO.

Another post I found on Ubuntuforums said to try the following:

growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvdrw=dvd.img

Where /dev/dvdrw is your dvd/cd burner.

FOLLOWUP:
The IMG file I had from Microsoft was a multi-session disk so I was not able to use the steps above. However, when I simply changed the file extension to ‘.iso’ it worked fine. There seems to be very little difference between IMG and ISO.

I know that using grep is the best way to search on a Linux server, so I start there.  Here is the command syntax:

grep "text string to search for" /path/to/search

Examples
To search for a string called “myFunction” in all text files located in /var/www/html/*.php use:

grep "myFunction" /var/www/html/*.php

To search recursively in all sub-directories you would alter the command by adding the -r option:

grep -r "myFunction" /var/www/html

Now you have probably noticed that grep prints out the matching lines containing your string, but you may also need the filenames of the files containing the string instead. You can use the -H option to narrow the output the filename followed by the line containing your search string, like so:

grep -H -r "myFunction" /var/www/html

This would output something like:

...
your_file.php: line containing myFunction
..

To print out just the filename you can cut command like this to clean the output further: (Note the one after the f, not an L)

grep -H -r "myFunction" /var/www/html | cut -d: -f1

The new cleaner out put would be like:

...
your_file.php
...

My strategy is to backup all of my Windows and Linux servers to one central Windows server that is running a Tivoli backup agent. All of my servers are hosted elsewhere, and since it costs $99.00 per server to backup I am getting the most for my money by only backing a single server to tape/SAN. However that single server carries all of the files that need to be remotely backed up to tape/SAN.

My earlier posts show how to backup the Windows servers:
Windows backup bat script using xcopy

Also, how to backup the Windows Domain Controller:
Backup Windows Domain Controller using NTBACKUP via cmd

And I also showed how to backup a Linux server to a local file:
Linux backup using CRON to local directory

Now I will show how I moved the files backed up on the Linux servers to the Windows server prior to tape/SAN backup. I have decided to use Samba and mount a directory pointing to a shared folder on the Windows server. Lets begin:

1. Create a share on the Windows server to use as your backup location.
2. Create a user to use this share, and give the user permissions to use it.
3. Pick, or create, a user that you’re going to use to backup the files. Log in as this user and type ‘id’ to get the numeric ID of the user in the Linux OS. (You will need it later.)
4. Become ‘root’. (This will enable you to perform the next tasks without problems.)
5. Install samba and samba-client if they are not installed yet.

   yum install samba
   yum install samba-client

   You will need to answer ‘y’ to when prompted.

6. By default only the root user can mount or unmount a cifs, so we must open it to other users.

   chmod 4755 /sbin/mount.cifs
   chmod 4755 /sbin/umount.cifs

7. Now we need to make a directory to use as our mount point.

   mkdir /mnt/sharename

8. To enable our desired user to mount and unmount this we need to assign ownership to that user. Changing permissions with chmod is not enough.

   chown userfrom#1 /mnt/sharename

9. Now we need to edit the /etc/fstab file and add an entry. Replace the user ID of 500 with your user ID from #1. Replace sharename with your Windows share name. Replace WINDOWSHOST with your hostname or IP address. If you don’t know the shares run smbclient -L WINDOWSHOST

   //WINDOWSHOST/sharename /mnt/sharename cifs credentials=/root/smblogin,uid=500,noauto,user 0 0

10. Create/Edit a file /root/smblogin and put the following two lines in it.

    username=WINDOWS USERNAME
    password=WINDOWS PASSWORD

11. Now we must give our user from #1 access to the file, but still protect it.

    chown userfrom#1 /root/smblogin
    chmod 600 /root/smblogin

12. If you have IPTABLES active on your server you will need to make sure to add a policy to allow OUTPUT port 445.
13. Log in as the user from #1
14. Try to mount the share:

    mount /mnt/sharename
    ls -la /mnt/sharename
    umount /mnt/sharename

15. If that was successful you are now ready to write a script that will automate the moving of your backup files from the Linux to the Windows share. (Script/File = backup.sh)

    #!/bin/sh
    mount /mnt/sharename
     
    cp -r /path/to/file.tar.gz /mnt/sharename/path/to/file.tar.gz
     
    umount /mnt/sharename

    Of course you can add this to the end of the file described in Linux backup using CRON to local directory which would create a complete solution for backing up files, then relocating them to a remote Windows server.

16. Next you will add an entry to the crontab of the user from #1 to happen automagically.

    crontab -e -u userfrom#1

17. Enter this into the crontab.

    # Backup at 1:00 A.M. every day. Call 'man 5 crontab' for more information
    * 1 * * * /path/to/backup.sh

Now once this is all done you can rest a little bit easier knowing that your servers are backed up. I hear the beach calling me now….ttyl.

I have multiple Linux servers with many websites on each, as well as database. So I created a script that simply tar’s the files, then gzips them with the date in the filename for archiving.

Here is the file named ‘backupall.sh’ that I save in a place reachable by the user I will use to schedule this cronjob:

#!/bin/sh
date
echo "############### Backing up files on the system... ###############"
 
backupfilename=server_file_backup_`date '+%Y-%m-%d'`
 
echo "----- First do the sql by deleting the old file and dumping the current data -----"
rm -f /tmp/backup.sql
mysqldump --user=mysqluser --password=password --all-databases --add-drop-table > /tmp/backup.sql
 
echo "----- Now tar, then zip up all files to be saved -----"
tar cvf /directory/to/store/file/${backupfilename}.tar /home/* /var/www/html/* /usr/local/svn/* /etc/php.ini /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf /tmp/backup.sql /var/trac/*
gzip /directory/to/store/file/${backupfilename}.tar
rm /directory/to/store/file/${backupfilename}.tar
chmod 666 /directory/to/store/file/${backupfilename}.tar.gz
 
echo "############### Completed backing up system... ###############"
date

As you can see by the tar line I am backing up:

• The home directory so all users data is backed up.
• The html directory where all web sites reside.
• My subversion(svn) directory where all of my version control repositories reside because losing them would mean losing years of historical data.
• My php.ini
• The apache configuration file
• The sql file with the database backup created earlier in the script.
• Last my trac settings, that house all of my project related history.

All of these will be saved in a tar file that I then zip using gzip, and store in a directory somewhere. Finally I then set the files permissions to 666 which allows pretty much any user copy it to another location for remote backup.

You may also notice that I put ‘date’ at the beginning and end of the backupall.sh file. This echos out the date and time so that I can see the time when the job started and ended.

The script above should be saved somewhere, and then executed via CRON. Here is how I set up my crontab to handle that by using the command “crontab -e”. (Alternatively you can use “crontab -e -u anotheruser” to have the task added to a user other than the one you are logged on with. Many will add this to the root users crontab.)

* 1 * * * backupall.sh

This line in the crontab tells CRON to run this script every day at 1:00AM.

Logging the output from CRON to a file.
If I desired to keep a log of the events it would be nice to output the feedback from the backupall.sh to a file and use it as a log. I can do this by creating a file to use as a log file, and changing the owner of the file to be the cronjob user that is executing backupall.sh:

touch backup_log.txt
chown cronjobuser backup_log.txt

And then editing the crontab line to be as follows:

* 1 * * * backupall.sh > /path/to/backup_log.txt 2>&1

Note that the cronjob line above will not append to the log file, but will clear it and then write the current contents to it. If you wish to append to the file like a true log file you can use >> instead of the single > making the crontab look like this:

* 1 * * * backupall.sh >> /path/to/backup_log.txt 2>&1

To see how I remotely backup this file please see my other post at: Geekyboy.com.

@echo off
:: variables
set logfile=D:\backup_log_file.txt
 
echo %Date% # # # Backing up system state containing: local Registry, COM+ Class Registration Database, System Boot Files, Certificates(if certificate server installed), Cluster database(if installed), NTDS.DIT, and SYSVOL folder >> %logfile%
ntbackup backup systemstate /J "System State Backup Job" /F "D:\system_state_backup.bkf" >> %logfile%
 
echo %Date% Backup Completed! >> %logfile%

(NOTE: I am doing this backup via an internal network and using a user account that exists on both systems. Security may dictate that you handle this differently based on your circumstances.)

After the file is executed by Windows Scheduled Tasks you will then be left with a file that is ready to backup somewhere. I do this by making a copy to another server by using the methods covered in a previous blog post at Windows backup bat script using xcopy.

@echo
:: variables
set sourcedrive=D:\
set backupdrive=\\servername\d$
set backupcmd=xcopy /s /c /d /e /h /i /r /y
 
echo # # # Moving files
%backupcmd% "%sourcedrive%\directory_to_backup" "%backupdrive%\directory_to_store_backup"
 
echo # # Moveing Complete!

(NOTE: I am doing this backup via an internal network and using a user account that exists on both systems. Security may dictate that you handle this differently based on your circumstances.)

Notice that for the backupdrive I am calling another Windows server and using the d$. This would require that the Windows Scheduled Task be executed using a user that is trusted on both machines. Also you could specify a local directory on the same server if you did not need to copy the files to another server.

If I were executing this via Window Scheduled Tasks there is nowhere for me to see what happened, what files were moved, etc. This can be solved by adding the following line in the variables area specifying a log file to capture all output that would normally be seen via command line:

set logfile=D:\backup_log_file.txt

Then I would append “>> %logfile%” to the end of each line so that it would be added to the log file. In addition I could prepend “%Date%” after echo on each line to date stamp each line.

Here is what the final file with these two additions would look like:

@echo
:: variables
set sourcedrive=D:\
set backupdrive=\\servername\d$
set backupcmd=xcopy /s /c /d /e /h /i /r /y
set logfile=D:\backup_log_file.txt
 
echo %Date% # # # Moving files >> %logfile%
%backupcmd% "%sourcedrive%\directory_to_backup" "%backupdrive%\directory_to_store_backup" >> %logfile%
 
echo %Date% # # Moveing Complete! >> %logfile%

UltraEdit on Ubuntu

You can find out more on the Blog Post, or you can see the Formal Product Page.

There was an update issued by RHN this evening which updated the bind-chroot rpm. As part of it’s post install script it will attempt to relocate any zone files that may be located outside of the chroot into a chrooted directory in /var/named/chroot.

Since PSA implements a chroot for named outside of this package the nameserver files will be relocated to a path like…

/var/named/chroot/var/named/run-root/var/named/

This will of course break named’s ability to startup.

simply remove the bind-chroot rpm and re-link the /etc/named.conf file to the right location.

rpm -e bind-chroot
ln -sf /var/named/run-root/etc/named.conf /etc/named.conf
/sbin/service named restart

You should be good to go at that point.

First I needed to get ‘make’ and ‘mod_ssl’ running to allow for this. (I use sudo but you could login as su)

sudo yum install make

sudo yum install mod_ssl

Next I did the following steps:

1. Go to /etc/pki/tls/certs
2. Run the command sudo make mycert.pem
3. Enter the information you are prompted for about country, state, city, host name etc, your certificate and key has been created
4. Now edit /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf and update the following items:
• SSLCACertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/mycert.pem
• SSLCACertificateKeyFile /etc/pki/tls/mycert.pem
5. I was forced to create a symbolic link for the SSLCACertificateKeyFile as follows: (I think this was supposed to happen automagically.)
• I went to /etc/pki/tls and created the symbolic link using the next line.
• sudo ln -s certs/mycert.pem mycert.pem
6. Restart Apache (/etc/init.d/httpd restart)

There, now you have a self-signed certificate for your apache virtualhosts.

To fix this I searched the tiny_mcs.js and found that TinyMCE had two settings in the tiny_mce.js file that are boolean flags (true,false or 0,1) dealing with URL’s. The variables are relative_urls and convert_urls, and by default they are set to true, or 1.

After changing these setting to false (or zero) I have not had any further problems with using TinyMCE to edit email content.

The df utility displays the disk space usage on all mounted filesystems. The -T option prints the filesystem type as well. By default, df measures the size in 1K blocks, which could be a little difficult for a desktop user to decipher. Use the -h option to get more understandable output:

$ df -h -T
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6     ext3     20G  9.3G  9.1G  51% /
/dev/hda7 reiserfs     13G  2.1G   11G  17% /mnt/suse
/dev/sda1     vfat    241M  152M   90M  63% /media/usbdisk

You can use the du command to determine which files or directories need to be deleted — or at least trimmed. A simple du will print usage for the present working directory and its subdirectories, along with the size of each directory.

If you want the size of an particular directory, specify it with du directoryname. For instance, du -h /home/bodhi/podcasts will print the size of the podcasts directory in a more readable format than the kilobytes used by default. The -c option prints the grand total size of the directory at the end. The -a option also displays the file names along with directories and can be of use when you want to see a list of files in a particular directory. The -s option will display a summary, without showing all of the subdirectories.

Running du -ch | grep total prints just one line with the total size of the directory. If there’s a particular type of file that you would like to be excluded while calculating a directory’s usage, specify it with the --exclude=type option. Here we’ll check the disk usage of the current directory, and display all file names with their disk usage, and then sort them numerically using the sort utility:

$ du -ah | sort -n
4.2M    ./eweek.10.28.05.mp3
4.5M    ./LQ-Podcast-101105.mp3
4.8M    ./LQ-Podcast-110905.mp3
19M     ./LQRadio-Episode3.mp3
20M     ./LQRadio-Searls.mp3
36M     ./LQRadio-HiserAndAdelstein.mp3
197M    .

This very nifty site allows you to create tiled background images for use wherever you may need them. At first I thought “yuck, I stopped using backgrounds long ago”. But after playing with rotation, colors, and opacity I found that a pretty nice tiled background can be useful when applied right.

It is very difficult to do a good job on tiled backgrounds, but this site makes it easy.
www.BgPatterns.com

The system in question is my Dell Inspiron 1720 running Hardy Heron Ubuntu. I knew of a few changes to my system, but none of them seemed to have caused the problem. So I hunted for a few days trying to figure it out. I performed multiple searches on the net, and each led me to a dead end. Many said, “Set this … in your php.ini” or “Set that … in your my.cnf”, and some even said Apache was to blame. However, I found the solution to be very simple.

MySQL was expecting the mysql.sock to be located in ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’. However, for some reason it had moved or the symbolic link to it’s actual location was deleted by some update or install I did recently.

I fixed the problem by adding a symbolic link to the actual home of mysqld.sock, which was /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock. Here is how I created the symbolic link: (at the command line)

sudo ln -s /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

sudo puts us in super user mode, “ln -s” creates a symbolic link followed by the target the links sould point to and last by the location of the link.

Edited on Sep. 26th with update below:

The fix above did not work as a permanent fix. I found that whenever I rebooted the OS it forced me to recreate the symbolic link. MySQL was failing to recreate the symbolic link on it’s own. To permanently fix the issue I needed to add the creation of the symbolic link to my SESSION startup. Here is how I did that:

By going to the System->Preferences->Sessions to edit the Startup Programs. I added an item that automatically issues the command above, but without the “sudo”.

Mission accomplished…permanently.

Finally it dawned on me, and I am not sure why or how. But a few weeks prior I had been toying with a Bluetooth stereo headset and had turned on the Audio service in the Bluetooth manager on the services tab.

Problem fixed: I simply turned off the Audio service in the Bluetooth manager, and all is working normally again. However, if I ever need the Audio service I suppose it will break my sound.

Do you have, or did you recently post your email address on a website?

Then the reason is probably because you did not properly protect the email address, and spammers get most email addresses from robot script that harvest email addresses from websites. It is pretty simple really. The robot script hits the largest search engines for certain key words or phrases, to help the spammer hit the most relevent email addresses, and then systematically follows the links to websites. Once the robot gets to the website it then searches all links on the page. Each link it finds on the page that is a “mailto:” is an email address, and in a matter of minutes a robot script can harvest hundreds of emails.

So now you are asking, “What can be done to protect me from these vile robots?”. Well that answer is also simple. Most robot script are not smart enough, yet, to search Javascript code that scrambles an email address and form it back into a valid email address. So here is how to do it:

First, you need to go into the HTML code and insert the Javascript as follows:

var theuser = "username" // change this to be the username, or portion of the email to the left of the @
var thehost = "your-domain.com" // change this to be your domain name
 
var themessage = theuser + "@" + thehost;
 
// Now we tell Javascript to bring the pieces of the email address together visually on the screen as a link
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + theuser + "@" + thehost + ">" + themessage + "</a>")

Note: Be sure to substitute username and your-domain.com with your own information.

Now when you view your webpage in your favorite browser (Firefox) you will see the email as a link like you wanted, and the robots will see a bunch of code that most of them cannot form into a valid email address.

useradd -s /bin/false remote_user
mkdir /home/remote_user/.ssh
touch /home/remote_user/.ssh/authorized_keys
chown -R remote_user:remote_user /home/remote_user/.ssh
chmod 755 /home/remote_user/.ssh
chmod 600 /home/remote_user/.ssh/authorized_keys

Add MySQL permissions in the remote MySQL database to allow user connections from localhost.

USE mysql;
GRANT ALL ON db.* TO database_user@127.0.0.1 IDENTIFIED BY 'database_pass';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Now, on the local server (as root) create an RSA key pair to avoide the need for passwords for remote_user. (Simply hit enter for each question encountered.)

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Now transfer the public key file to the remote server from your local server.

scp /var/root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@remote_server.com:/tmp/local_server.local_rsa.pub
ssh remote_server.com
cat /tmp/local_server.local_rsa.pub >> /home/remote_user/.ssh/authorized_keys

On the local server, create an SSH tunnel to the remote MySQL database server using the following command.

ssh -fNg -L 3306:127.0.0.1:3306 remote_user@remote_server.com sleep 9999

To use this from PHP you would simply do this:

$remote_server_mysql = mysql_connect( "127.0.0.1", "database_user", "database_pass" );
mysql_select_db( "database", $remote_server_mysql );

Simply use the command below to view the last 100 lines of a log file, and as new entries are added to the file they are automatically displayed on the screen.

tail -f /the/file/name -n -100

Error: Unable to create backup session: Specified file is not accessible

Finally i solved this problem!!!! it was all about wrong permission in some folders!

check that the folders ‘/var/lib/psa/dumps’ and ‘/var/lib/psa/dumps/tmp’ are chmod to 777