Posts Tagged ‘function’

PHP system(); hide command output – How to hide displayed output with exec();

Saturday, April 7th, 2012

I've recently wanted to use PHP's embedded system(""); – external command execute function in order to use ls + wc to calculate the number of files stored in a directory. I know many would argue, this is not a good practice and from a performance view point it is absolutely bad idea. However as I was lazy to code ti in PHP, I used the below line of code to do the task:

<?
echo "Hello, ";
$line_count = system("ls -1 /dir/|wc -l");
echo "File count in /dir is $line_count \n";
?>

This example worked fine for me to calculate the number of files in my /dir, but unfortunately the execution output was also visialized in the browser. It seems this is some kind of default behaviour in both libphp and php cli. I didn't liked the behaviour so I checked online for a solution to prevent the system(); from printing its output.

What I found as a recommendations on many pages is instead of system(); to prevent command execution output one should use exec();.
Therefore I used instead of my above code:

<?
echo "Hello, ";
$line_count = exec("ls -1 /dir/|wc -l");
echo "File count in /dir is $line_count \n";
?>

By the way insetad of using exec();, it is also possible to just use ` (backtick) – in same way like in bash scripting's .

Hence the above code can be also written for short like this:

<?
echo "Hello, ";
$line_count = `ls -1 /dir/|wc -l`;
echo "File count in /dir is $line_count \n";
?>

:)

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How to increase brightness on Fujitsu Siemens Amilo PI22515 notebook with Slackware Linux

Friday, March 9th, 2012

Increase LCD screen brightness on Fujitsu Siemens Amilo laptop with Linux Slackware

A friend of mine has Fujitsu Siemens Amilo laptop and is full time using his computer with Slackware Linux.

He is quite happy with Slackware Linux 13.37 on the laptop, but unfortunately sometimes his screen brightness lowers. One example when the screen gets darkened is when he switch the computer on without being plugged in the electricity grid. This lowered brightness makes the screen un-user friendly and is quite tiring for the eye …

By default the laptop has the usual function keys and in theory pressing Function (fn) + F8 / F7 – should increase / decrease the brightness with no problems, however on Slackware Linux (and probably on other Linuxes too?), the function keys are not properly recognized and not responding whilst pressed.
I used to have brigtness issues on my Lenovo notebook too and remember how irritating this was.
After a bit of recalling memories on how I solved this brightness issues I remembered the screen brigthness on Linux is tunable through /proc virtual (memory) filesystem.

The laptop (Amilo) Fujitsu Siemens video card is:

lspci |grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (primary) (rev 03)

I took a quick look in /proc and found few files called brightness:
 

  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD01/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD03/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD04/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD05/brightness

cat-ting /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD01/brightness, /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD03/brightness, /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD04/brightness all shows not supported and therefore, they cannot be used to modify brightness:

bash-4.1# for i in $(/proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD0{1,3,4,5}/brightness); do \
cat $i;
done
<not supported>
<not supported>
<not supported>
<not supported>

After a bit of testing I finally succeeded in increasing the brightness.
Increasing the brightness on the notebook Intel GM965 video card model is done, through file:

/proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness

To see all the brightness levels the Fujitsu LCD display supports:

bash-4.1# cat /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness
levels: 13 25 38 50 63 75 88 100
current: 25

As you can see the dark screen was caused cause the current: brightness is set to a low value of 25.
To light up the LCD screen and make the screen display fine again, I increased the brightness to the maximum level 100, e.g.:

bash-4.1# echo '100' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brigthness

Just for the fun, I've written also a two lines script which gradually increases LCDs brightness :)

bash-4.1# echo '13' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness;
bash-4.1# for i in \
$(cat /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness|grep 'levels'|sed -e 's#levels:##g'); do \
echo $i > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness; sleep 1; \done

fujitsu_siemens_brightness_fun.sh script is fun to observe in changing the LCD screen gradually in one second intervals :)

Here is also a tiny program that reduces and increases the notebook laptop brightness written in C. My friend Dido, coded it in just few minutes just for the fun :)
To permanently solve the issues with darkened screen on boot time it is a good idea to include echo '100' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brigthness in /etc/rc.local:

bash-4.1# echo '100' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brigthness

I've also written another Universal Linux Increase laptop screen brightness Shell script which should be presumable also working for all Laptop models running Linux :)

My maximize_all_linux_laptops_brightness.sh "universal increase Linux brightness" script is here
I'll be glad to hear from people who had tested the script on other laptops and can confirm it works fine for them.
 

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How to convert SVG to PNG graphic formats (using GUI and console) on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

SVG to PNG Convert on GNU / Linux FreeBSD using command and GUI

I've playing trying to learn InkScape The Open Source vector graphic editor .By so far I'm quite impressed on how easy this program is learned and how easy graphical manipulation with this nifty program can be done.
The default format in which InkScape saves its files is SVG (Scalable Vectors Graphics). For all those unfamiliar with SVG – SVG is an open (free format) format developed in 1999 which insetad of containing binary data like PNG or JPEG does contain plain XML content. SVG being consisted of plain XML has multiple advantageous, the most important one makes it easy for text and visual data to be displayed among different program svg readers in absolutely identical way. Besides that the format if read with plain text editor like vim or emacs can be altered directly via the source.
Being multi system interoperable makes SVG as a great format for text and visual data storage in HTML5, actually SVG is already a part of the HTML5 html coding standard. And most probably its adoption rate will raise up drastically as soon as HTML5 starts substitute HTML4 and lower web standards.

Anyways I'm slipping away from the aim of this post so I'll stop blabbering on how great SVG is and let people check it out for themselves (if not already).

Going back to the aim of my article to show How to convert SVG to PNG graphical extension on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

After producing a bunch of files with InkScape I realized the default format in which Inkscape stores its files is SVG , this was okay with me but since I wanted to have my experimental produced content in PNG I needed a way to convert SVG to
My first logical guess was that The Gimp will be able to handle the situation and after opening my SVG file with GIMP and used the gimp File -> Save As option and give the SVGfile an extension of PNG , Gimp succesfully converted the file to PNG.

However I wanted to dig further and check out what is the standard accepted way to convert SVG files using a plain command. This will possibly be handy to me if I had to do something online (let's say a website) which will accept SVG and will require the SVG files to be converted and also stored in PNG or other Graphic file formats.

After checking online, I've found a post which pointed me to librsvg2 which contains RSVG (Turn SVG files into raster images.)

librsvg is available as a package in most mainstream Linux distributions nowdays, Fedora, Debian etc., as well as contains a port inside the FreeBSD ports system. Since I'm using Debian on my notebook where I installed and tested the command line SVG to PNG convertion the way I did it is:

noah:/home/hipo/Desktop# apt-get --yes install librsvg2-bin
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
librsvg2-bin
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 16 not upgraded.
Need to get 72.5 kB of archives.
After this operation, 180 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/ squeeze/main librsvg2-bin amd64 2.26.3-1 [72.5 kB]
Fetched 72.5 kB in 0s (184 kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package librsvg2-bin.
(Reading database ... 376046 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking librsvg2-bin (from .../librsvg2-bin_2.26.3-1_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up librsvg2-bin (2.26.3-1) ...

Afterwards the exact convertion of my Inscape SVG file drawing.svg to drawing.png using rsvg I've done like so:

hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ rsvg drawing.svg drawing.png

The convertion results for me was 100% uniqueness between the file converted and the output PNG. Some people might wonder why I didn't used Inkscape's Export to Bitmap function and then use convert command part of ImageMagick in order to convert the produced Inkscape bitmap to PNG.

 

One other thing worthy to mention is on  Debian,  librsvg2-bin contains 2 more executable besides rsvg. One is the rsvg-view command which allows one to view SVG files using command line or Graphic enviroment, the other one is rsvg-convert which supports again SVG convertion to PDF and to PNG

Before proceeding with the other described ways to convert SVG to PNG earlier in this article, I give a try to Inkscape's Export to Bitmap embedded function but the produced bitmap did not resembled the original SVG file so I decided to completely abandon this method
Maybe there is some particular reason of the chaotic way I've tested Inkscape to place random images sometimes going out of the field of a paper etc. which influenced the improper generation of Bitmap using Inkscape, despite that it seems InkScape needs some more development until the bugs in Bitmap producing get fixed and it can be freely used to produce Bitmaps.

Maybe there is some particular reason for the failure of Inkscape to produce a good BMP file, like for example the chaotic way I've tested Inkscape to place random images sometimes going out of the field of a paper borders etc.This should have influenced the improper generation of Bitmap using Inkscape, anyhow it seems InkScape needs some more development until the bugs in Bitmap creation get fixed.

By the way if you're wondering how to convert PNG to bitmap BMP after, once having converted SVG to PNG this is easily doable with convert command, like so:

hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ convert drawing.png drawing.bmp

Maybe in future releases it will be a good idea if InkScape developers integrate a convertion to other formats this will make it handy and make surely these nice program more popular among users. Hope this is helpful. Cheers and as RMS likes to say Happy Hacking ;)

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Fix of “Unable to allocate memory for pool.” PHP error messages

Saturday, October 15th, 2011

Since some time, I don't know exactly where, after some updates of my WordPress running on a small server with FreeBSD 7.2. I've started getting a lot of Apache crashes. Often the wordpress scripts stopped working completely and I got only empty pages when trying to process the wordpress blog in a browser.

After a bunch of reading online, I've figured out that the cause might be PHP APC stands for Alternative PHP Cache .

I was not sure if the PHP running on the server had an APC configured at all so I used a phpinfo(); script to figure out if I had it loaded. I saw the APC among the loaded to show off in the list of loaded php modules, so this further led me to the idea the APC could be really causing the unexpected troubles.

Thus first I decided to disable the APC on a Virtualhost level for the domain where the crashing wordpress was hosted, to do I placed in the VirtualHost section in the Apache configuration /usr/local/etc/apache2/httpd.conf the following config directive:

php_flag apc.cache_by_default Off

These get me rid of the multiple errors:

PHP Warning: require_once() [function.require-once]: Unable to allocate memory for pool. in /usr/local/www/data-dist/blog/wp-content/plugins/tweet-old-post/top-admin.php on line 6

which constantly were re-occuring in php_error.log:

Further after evaluating all the websites hosted on the server and making sure none of which was really depending on APC , I've disabled the APC completely for PHP. To do so I issued:

echo 'apc.enabled = 0' >> /usr/local/etc/php.ini

Similarly on GNU/Linux to disable globally APC from PHP only the correct location to php.ini should be provided on Debian this is /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini .

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Filter messages in Qmail with unwanted words, get rid of the Viagra annoying spam with Qtrap

Sunday, September 4th, 2011

Drop qmail received mail containing banned / unwanted words to get rid of Viagra and Sex related spam

Recently the annoying Viagra spam has emerged again. Therefore I decided to clean up some of the mails received to one of the qmail servers to protect users emailbox from this viagra peril.

To do so I've remember about an old script which used to be part of qmailrocks.org qmail install, the script is called qtrap and is able to filter emails based on list of specific mail contained words.
Since qmailrocks.org is gone (down) for some time and its still available only on few mirrored locations which by the way are not too easy to find I decided to write a little post on how qtrap.sh could be integrated quick & easy with any Qmail + Vpopmail install out there.

Hereby I include the description for qtrap.sh given by the script author:

"qtrap.sh script is applied on a per domain basis and serves as a "bad word" scanner to catch any spam that Spamassassin may have missed. This filter serves as the last defense against SPAM before it arrived in your inbox. I like this filter because it helps to get rid of any SPAM that happens to make it by Spamassassin. Without any protection at all, my mailbox gets a shit ton of SPAM every day. Within the first 3 months I enacted the Qtrap filter, Qtrap logged over 9,000 deleted SPAM messages, none of which were legitimate e-mails. My keyboard's delete key was very appreciated the extra rest.

Any emails that are scanned and contain a banned word will be automatically deleted and logged by the qtrap script. A whitelist feature now exists so that individual addresses or domains can be exempt from the qtrap scan."

Now as one might have general idea on what the script does. Here is the step by step qtrap.sh integration;

1. Create necessery qtrap directory and logs and set proper permissions

If the vpopmail is installed in /home/vpopmail , issue the following commands.

debian:~# cd /home/vpopmail
debian:~# mkdir -p qtrap/logs
debian:/home/vpopmail/qtrap# cd qtrap
debian:/home/vpopmail/qtrap# wget http://www.pc-freak.net/files/qtrap.sh
...
debian:/home/vpopmail/qtrap# cd ~
debian:~# touch /home/vpopmail/qtrap/logs/qtrap.logdebian:~# chown -R vpopmail:vchkpw /home/vpopmail/qtrapdebian:~# chmod -R 755 /home/vpopmail/qtrap

On older qmail installations it could be vpopmail is installed in /var/vpopmail if that's the case, link /var/vpopmail to /home/vpopmail and go back to step 1. To link:

debian:~# ln -sf /var/vpopmail/ /home/vpopmail

2. Edit qtrap.sh to whitelist email addresses and build a ban words list

a) Include the email addresses mail arriving from which would not be checked by qtrap.sh

Inside qtrap.sh in line 63, there is a shell function whitelist_check(), the function looks like so:

whitelist_check () {
case $WHITELIST in
address@somewhere.com|address@somewhereelse.com)
echo $SENDER found in whitelist on `date "+%D %H:%M:%S"` >> /home/vpopmail/qtrap/logs/qtrap.log
exit 0;;
*)
;;
esac
}

By default the script has just two sample mails which gets whitelisted this is the line reading:

address@somewhere.com|address@somewhereelse.com

The whitelisted emails should be separated with a pipe, thus to add two more sample emails to get whitelisted by script the line should be changed like:

address@somewhere.com|address@somewhereelse.com|hipod@mymailserver.com|hipo@gmail.com

In order to whitelist an entire domain let's say yahoo.com add a line to the above code like:

address@somewhere.com|address@somewhereelse.com|hipod@mymailserver.com|hipo@gmail.com|*yahoo.com

b) Defining the bad words ban list, mails containing them should not be delivery by qmail

The function that does check for the ban word list inside the script is checkall();, below is a paste from the script function:

checkall () {
case $BANNED_WORDS in
porn|PORN|Sex|SEX)
printout $BANNED_WORDS
echo MESSAGE DROPPED from $SENDER because of $BANNED_WORDS on `date "+%D %H:%M:%S"` >> /home/vpopmail/qtrap/logs/qtrap.log
exit 99;;
*)
;;
esac
}

checkall(); is located on line 74 in qtrap.sh, the exact list of banned words which the script should look for is located on line 76, the default qtrap.sh filters only mails containing just 4 words, e.g.:

porn|PORN|Sex|SEX)

To add the Viagra and VIAGRA common spam words to the list, modify it and expand like so:

porn|PORN|Sex|SEX|viagra|Viagra)

The delimiter is again | , so proceed further and add any unwanted spam words that are not common for any legit mails.

3. Install qtrap.sh to process all emails delivered to vpopmail

If its necessery to install the dropping of mails based on word filtering only to a single vpopmail virtualdomain do it with cmd:

debian:~# cd /home/vpopmail/domains/yourdomain.com
debian:/home/vpopmail/domains/yourdomain.com# touch .qmail-default.new
debian:/home/vpopmail/domains/yourdomain.com# echo '| /home/vpopmail/qtrap/qtrap.sh' >> .qmail-default.new
debian:/home/vpopmail/domains/yourdomain.com# echo "| /home/vpopmail/bin/vdelivermail '' bounce-no-mailbox" >> .qmail-default.new
debian:/home/vpopmail/domains/yourdomain.com# chown vpopmail:vchkpw .qmail-default.new
debian:/home/vpopmail/domains/yourdomain.com# cp -rpf .qmail-default .qmail-default.bak; mv .qmail-default.new .qmail-default
If however qtrap.sh needs to get installed for all existing vpopmail virtualdomains on the qmail server, issue a one liner bash script:

debian:~# cd /home/vpopmail/domains
debian:/var/vpopmail/domains# for i in *; do cd $i; echo "| /home/vpopmail/qtrap/qtrap.sh" >> $i/.qmail-default.new; \
echo "| /home/vpopmail/bin/vdelivermail '' bounce-no-mailbox" >> $i/.qmail-default.new; \
chown vpopmail:vchkpw .qmail-default.new; mv .qmail-default .qmail-default.old; mv .qmail-default.new .qmail-default; cd ..; done

This for loop will add '| /home/vpopmail/qtrap/qtrap.sh' to all .qmail-default for all vpopmail domains.

Afterwards the .qmail-default file should contain the following two lines:

| /home/vpopmail/qtrap/qtrap.sh
| /home/vpopmail/bin/vdelivermail '' delete

A very important thing here you should consider that adding some common words, as let's say hello or mail etc. could easily drop almost all the emails the qmail hands in to vpopmail.

Caution!! Never ever implement common words in the list of words !!
Always make sure the banned words added to qtrap.sh are words that are never enter an everyday legit email.

Another thing to keep in mind is that qtrap.sh doesn't make a copy of the received message ,though it can easily be modified to complete this task.
Any mail that matches the banned words list will be dropped and lost forever.

4. Check if qtrap.sh is working

To check, if qtrap is working send mail to some mailbox located on the qmail server containing inside subject or mail message body the unwanted word defined inside qtrap.sh.

The mail should not be received in the mailbox to which its sent, if qtrap is working moreover qtrap.sh should log it inside it's log file:

debian:~# cat /home/vpopmail/qtrap/logs/qtrap.log
MESSAGE DROPPED from hipo@mytestmail.com because of viagra on 09/03/11 11:34:19
MESSAGE DROPPED from support@mymailserver.com because of Viagra on 09/03/11 11:39:29

If the qtrap.log contains records similar to the one above, and the mail matching the banned word is not delivered, qtrap.sh is properly configured. If any issues check in qmail logs, they should have a good pointer on what went wrong with qtrap.sh invokation.

Note that I've integrated qtrap.sh to custom qmail install running on Debian Lenny 5.0 GNU/Linux.
If I have time I'll soon test if its working fine on the latest stable Debian Squeeze and will report here in comments.
If however someone is willing to test if the script works on Debian Squeeze 6.0 or have tested it already please drop a comment to report if it works fine.
qtrap.sh, is a bit oldish and is not written to work too optimal therefore on some heavy loaded mail servers it can create some extra load and a bit delay the mail delivery. Thus when implementang one needs to consider the downsides of putting it in.

Also I was thinking tt might be nice if the script is rewritten to read the ban words and whitelist mails from files instead of as it is now as the words are hard coded in the script.
If I have some free time, I'll probably do this, though I'm not sure if this is a too good idea as this might have a negative performance impact on the script execution time, as each instance of the script invoked should do one more operation of reading a file storing the ban words.

Well that's pretty much it, enjoy ;)

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How to compile latest qmailadmin (qmailadmin 1.2.15) on Debian Squeeze Linux

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

I've completed a qmail installation few days ago on a fresh installed Debian Squeeze 64 bit server. All is configured and works fine, except qmailadmin and vqadmin.
As the mail server was missing any kind of web mail administration panel, I needed to make at least one of the two above to make with qmail.

I decided to concentrate on qmailadmin and took the time to make it work. I used the following command lines and got the compile failure during make compilation:

debian:/usr/local/src/qmailadmin-1.2.15# ./configure --enable-cgibindir=/usr/lib/cgi-bin --enable-htmldir=/var/www/qmailadmin/ --enable-modify-quota
...
debian:/usr/local/src/qmailadmin-1.2.15# make
...

The source make failed with the following error:

In file included from template.c:45:
qmailadmin.h:37:1: warning: "MAX_FILE_NAME" redefined
In file included from template.c:28:
/home/vpopmail/include/vpopmail.h:146:1: warning: this is the location of the previous definition
template.c: In function "send_template_now":
template.c:505: error: "VERSION" undeclared (first use in this function)
template.c:505: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
template.c:505: error: for each function it appears in.)
make[1]: *** [template.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/qmailadmin-1.2.15'
make: *** [all] Error 2

To workaround these compile issues, I've had to modify the C source file belonging to qmailadmin ( template.c ), e.g.:

debian:/usr/local/src/qmailadmin-1.2.15# vim template.c

In the file I had to add besides the line:

#include "util.h"

The code:

#define VERSION ""

Aterwards qmailadmin's compile and install via make && make install-strip succeeded and now works perfectly fine ;)

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How to fix “Fatal error: Call to undefined function: curl_init()” on FreeBSD and Debian

Saturday, June 18th, 2011

After installing the Tweet Old Post wordpress plugin and giving it, I've been returned an error of my PHP code interpreter:

Call to undefined function: curl_init()

As I've consulted with uncle Google's indexed forums ;) discussing the issues, I've found out the whole issues are caused by a missing php curl module

My current PHP installation is installed from the port tree on FreeBSD 7.2. Thus in order to include support for php curl it was necessery to install the port /usr/ports/ftp/php5-curl :

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/ftp/php5-curl
freebsd# make install clean

(note that I'm using the php5 port and it's surrounding modules).

Fixing the Call to undefined function: curl_init() on Linux hosts I suppose should follow the same logic, e.g. one will have to install php5-curl to resolve the issue.
Fixing the missing curl_init() function support on Debian for example will be as easy as using apt to install the php5-curl package, like so:

debian:~# apt-get install php5-curl
...

Now my tweet-old-post curl requirement is matched and the error is gone, hooray ;)

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How to fix “The function split() is deprecated in PHP 5.3″ on FreeBSD

Saturday, May 28th, 2011

If you're installing some PHP based CMS/blog like (Joomla or WordPress) or some kind of template and suddenly you stumble on a error:

Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /usr/local/www/websitedomain/templates/youbizz/html/modules.php on line 78

In order to fix that the file which spits the error message, in my case modules.php needs to be modified and the split php function has to be substituted with explode on every occuring place.

I experienced this error on FreeBSD 7_2 with php version 5.3.5 installed from ports.
This simple fix works fine.

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