We have several PHP applications and libraries incorrectly packaged for i386 rather than all, which means they wont install to our nice new shiny AMD64 servers. Unfortunately we don’t have (or at least we can’t find) the original package sources, so we need to ‘frobble’ the packages and change the arch by hand!
Deb files are just an ar package so we must first extract it! (FYI ar is like tar, but for pirates .. 🙁 )
Some of our PERL tools require some CPAN modules that are not part of the standard Ubuntu distribution. It’s obviously possible to install the module using CPAN but I like using deb packages where possible as then you only have one repository to manage. Fortunately with dh-make-perl it is possible to quickly turn any CPAN module in to a debian package!
First make sure dh-make-perl is installed
<br /> apt-get install dh-make-perl<br />
One of the newer features to our site is an access control mechanism to force specific paths to only be delivered over SSL when our customers have particularly sensitive data. We already use Apache2 with mod_jk to talk to the Tomcat5.5 instance running our app so the only part left is to enable SSL!
First make sure mod_ssl is enabled:
<br /> root@reltest-tcj0:/var/log/apache2# a2enmod<br /> Which module would you like to enable?<br /> Your choices are: actions asis auth_anon auth_dbm auth_digest auth_ldap cache cern_meta cgid cgi dav_fs dav deflate disk_cache expires ext_filter file_cache headers imap include info jk ldap mem_cache mime_magic proxy_connect proxy_ftp proxy_http proxy rewrite speling ssl suexec unique_id userdir usertrack vhost_alias<br /> Module name? ssl<br /> This module is already enabled!<br />
I accidently deleted my Pictures personal folder on my Vista laptop earlier and was stuck trying to recreate it. If I created a new folder and called it Pictures then it would turn in to a file, if I copied an existing folder and then renamed it to Pictures it, once again, would turn in to a file.
The trick to restoring it was to run the following command via the Run prompt in the Start Menu:
As part of our internal office systems upgrade we have a shiny new LDAP server which we like to use as much as possible. One of the things we use it for is Apache user auth, mainly we control SVN with it so people can only commit to the projects they’re allowed to but we also use it so secure our system’s services from the developers that like to play wannabe sysadmin!
I’ve had some debugging to do for work for a part of our site that uses webcams but I’ve been a bit hazey about starting it because the last time I plugged a webcam in to a Linux box, 100 years ago, it was a bit messy. I decided to risk it as I’m too lazy to go home and get my laptop, and .. it .. just .. worked ..
All blogs require silly amounts of feed generators, right? And this is a silly blog so requires a silly generator. The entire site is written using PHP5, and my automagic ‘datahandler’ activepage concept creates an XML document using DOM that then uses XSL as a templating engine, so I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to knock up a stylesheet to turn the default datahandler for the blog in to a nice atom feed! Just make sure you set the content-type to application/atom+xml when generate the page!
The php/java bridge it a pretty awesome little protocol that basically lets us use java classes inside our own PHP applications! This lets you harness the awesome power of all the Java libraries that exist, including the popular Lucene search engine library.
I referenced two excellent blog entries here and here whilst implementing Lucene search for this blog, but I am writing up the experience anyway to compare issues and difficulties and enhance my understanding of the process.