Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

Today by God's gracy I was blessed to go to Varna's Cathedral Church on a small pilgrimage trip to venerate the Holy Relics of Saint Maximus the Confessor.

As one can read in the saint biography, he is one of the biggest Orthodox Christian martyr saint from the time before the great Schizm (he lived in the 7th Century).

St. Maximus the Confessor was a Christian monk and a great Church scholar. He became a monk choosing willingly to abandon his great richness and political life because of Christ.

The Saint's title The Confessor is given because of his great suffering for Christian faith.

Because of the saint's firm staying in faith during an icon fighting heresy emperor Hiraclious (Iraklii) slandered the saint and he was send to a trial where he was immediately vilified as a state traitor.
A severe beating was ordered to be done on the saint and the whole ground was sprinkled with his blood, the saint's torturers also cut his tongue and his right hand was chopped off.
The heretical torturers were ordered to slay down his right hand and his tongue in order to prevent the saint to confess/preach and write down about the Orthodox Christian faith.

The descpile of the saint Anasthasius has also faced the same faith. After the butchery the two saints were walked around the city streets to mock them publicly behind the shocked crowds eyes.

Even though the sadistic torments by God's providence saint Maximus the Confessor did not died immediately but was sent to exile in today's Dobrudja (Dobrich) region in Bulgaria.

Saint Maximus has died in his old age, aged 82 in August 680 A.D. Even though being a disabled because of the martyrdom, during his exile the saint was able to write a lot of treatise books against heresies and especially against Monotheistic Christian heresy, and a lot of other writting concerning the proper spiritual christian life. The saint's major works are titled, Ambigua An exploration of difficult passages in the work of Pseudo-Dionysius and Gregory of Nazianzus, focusing on Christological issues and Mystagogy - A commentary and reasoning on the Eucharistic liturgy.

According to Church tradition after the saint's tongue was cut in order to prevent him to preach the Christian faith correctly, God did a miracle where even without a tongue he preached the Gospel to the masses and he heretical emperor who ordered his suffering and the saint tormentors were publicly disgraced.

Saint Maximus the Confessor is considered a saint also in the Roman Catholic Church.

The saint was canonized officially about 22 years after his death on the oecumenical Church saints assembly in year 682.
After Saint Maximus's death on his tomb many healing miracles occured.
On the place where he was buried three bright lights looking like candlesticks could be seen burning (a clear miracle atteting of the Holy Trinity) as the thrurthful one God.
God's great omen on his tomb is also a clear sign that Maximus the Confessor has been accepted in the eternal paradise with God with all the rightous.

Let God always strenthen us and help us, to all us who does venerate the saint. Let God by his Holy prayers deliver us from all heresies and grant us grace to stay firm in the true Orthodox Christian faith now and forever.
Amen!

I'm using access to the mysql servers via localhost with mysql cli on daily basis.
With time I've figured out that it's pretty unahandy to always login with my root mysql password, I mean each time to enter it, e.g.:

root@mysql-server:~# mysql -u root
Enter password:
...

Thus to make my life a way easier I decided to store my mysql root password in order to allow my root admin user to be able to login to my mysql server without asking for password. This saves time and nerves, as I'm not supposed to look up for the password file I store my server mysql root pass.

To allow my mysql cli interface, to login passwordless to the SQL server I had to create the file /root/.my.cnf readable only for my root user and store my MySQL username and password there.

Here is a sample /root/.my.cnf file:

root@mysql-server:~# cat /root/.my.cnf
[client]
user="root"
pass="mysecretMySQLPasswordgoeshere"


Now next time I use the mysql console interface to access my mysql server I don't have to supply the password, here is how easier is the mysql login afterwards:

root@mysql-server:~# mysql -u root
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 3520
Server version: 5.0.77 Source distribution

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql>


The only downside of using .my.cnf to store permanently the mysql server root and password is from security standpoint.
If for instance somebody roots my servers, where I have stored my root user/pwds in .my.cnf , he will be able immediately to get access to the MySQL server.

Another possible security flaw with using the mysql passwordless login "trick" is if somebody forgets to set proper file permissions to, .my.cnf

Once again the file should possess the permissons of:

root@mysql-server:~# ls -al /root/.my.cnf
-rw------- 1 root root 90 Apr 2 00:05 /root/.my.cnf


Any other permissons might allow non-privileged users to read the file and gain unathorized admin access to the SQL server.

Did you have to regenerate your SSL certificate for your mail server's IMAP and IMAP SSL service?
Did you have to find out if the newly installed certificates are fine after install?

Here is how:

root@server-hosting [/usr/local ]# openssl s_client -connect imap.example.com:993
root@server-hosting [/usr/local ]# openssl s_client -connect imap.example.com:143 -starttls imap


The output returned by this two commands will be the imap and imaps configured certificates as well as extensive info concerning the installed SSL, the last chunk of info to be spit is most crucial to know if certificate is fine.
It should be something like:

...
New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is AES256-SHA
Server public key is 1024 bit
Secure Renegotiation IS supported
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
SSL-Session:
Protocol : TLSv1
Cipher : AES256-SHA
Session-ID: 0B69E91022CB56D64F56CFA08405944D9C4C0069EE4097890B98F1406CF084D5
Session-ID-ctx:
Master-Key: 13745B94E0C5A0604EB7529E7409251961DFD5F4134F3A8FA1082F536A1B5157C86BAA7CC01140528AA729439E3F2E89
Key-Arg : None
Start Time: 1309265383
Timeout : 300 (sec)
Verify return code: 18 (self signed certificate)
---
. OK CAPABILITY completed
closed



I've been issuing new wildcard multiple SSL certificate to renew an expiring ones. After I completed the new certificate setup manually on the server (a CentOS 5.5 Final running SoluSVM Pro - Virtual Private Manager), I launched Firefox to give a try if the certificate is properly configured.

Instead of my expectations that the browser would just accept the certificate without spitting any error messages and all will be fine, insetad I got error with the just installed certificate and thus the browser failed to report the SSL cert is properly authenticated.

The company used to issue the SSL certificate is GlobeSSL - http://globessl.com , it was quite "hassle", with the tech support as the first certficate generated by globessl was generation based on SSL key file with 4096 key encryption.

As the first issued Authenticated certificate generated by GlobeSSL was not good further on about a week time was necessery to complete the required certificate reissuing ....

It wasn't just GlobeSSL's failure, as there were some spam filters on my side that was preventing some of GlobeSSL emails to enter normally, however what was partially their fault as they haven't made their notification and confirmation emails to pass by a mid-level strong anti-spam filter...

Anyways my overall experience with GlobeSSL certificate reissue and especially their technical support is terrible.
To make a parallel, issuing certificates with GoDaddy is a way more easier and straight forward.

Now let me come back to the main certificate error I got in Firefox ...

A bit of further investigation with the cert failure, has led me to the error message which tracked back to the newly installed SSL certificate issues.
In order to find the exact cause of the SSL certificate failure in Firefox I followed to the menus:

Tools -> Page Info -> Security -> View Certificate


Doing so in the General browser tab, there was the following error:

Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons


The information on Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons on the internet was very mixed and many people online suggested many possible causes of the issue, so I was about to loose myself.

Everything with the certificate seemed to be configured just fine in lighttpd, all the GlobeSSL issued .cer and .key file as well as the ca bundle were configured to be read used in lighttpd in it's configuration file:
/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Here is a section taken from lighttpd.conf file which did the SSL certificate cert and key file configuration:

$SERVER["socket"] == "0.0.0.0:443" {
ssl.engine = "enable"
ssl.pemfile = "/etc/lighttpd/ssl/wildcard.mydomain.bundle"
}


The file /etc/lighttpd/ssl/wildcard.mydomain.bundle was containing the content of both the .key (generated on my server with openssl) and the .cer file (issued by GlobeSSL) as well as the CA bundle (by GlobeSSL).

Even though all seemed to be configured well the SSL error Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons was still present in the browser.

GlobeSSL tech support suggested that I try their Web key matcher interface - https://confirm.globessl.com/key-matcher.html to verify that everything is fine with my certificate and the cert key. Thanks to this interface I figured out all seemed to be fine with the certificate and something else should be causing the SSL oddities.
I was further referred by GlobeSSL tech support for another web interface to debug errors with newly installed SSL certificates.
These interface is called Verify and Validate Installed SSL Certificate and is found here

Even though this SSL domain installation error report and debug tool did some helpful suggestions, it wasn't it that helped me solve the issues.

What helped was First the suggestion made by one of the many tech support guy in GlobeSSL who suggested something is wrong with the CA Bundle and on a first place the documentation on SolusVM's wiki - http://wiki.solusvm.com/index.php/Installing_an_SSL_Certificate .
Cccording to SolusVM's documentation lighttpd.conf's file had to have one extra line pointing to a seperate file containing the issued CA bundle (which is a combined version of the issued SSL authority company SSL key and certificate).
The line I was missing in lighttpd.conf (described in dox), looked like so:

ssl.ca-file = "/usr/local/solusvm/ssl/gd_bundle.crt"

Thus to include the directive I changed my previous lighttpd.conf to look like so:

$SERVER["socket"] == "0.0.0.0:443" {
ssl.engine = "enable"
ssl.pemfile = "/etc/lighttpd/ssl/wildcard.mydomain.bundle"
ssl.ca-file = "/etc/lighttpd/ssl/server.bundle.crt"
}


Where server.bundle.crt contains an exact paste from the certificate (CA Bundle) mailed by GlobeSSL.

There was a couple of other ports on which an SSL was configured so I had to include these configuration directive everywhere in my conf I had anything related to SSL.

Finally to make the new settings take place I did a lighttpd server restart.

[root@centos ssl]# /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart
Stopping lighttpd: [ OK ]
Starting lighttpd: [ OK ]


After lighttpd reinitiated the error was gone! Cheers !

One of the Cpanel servers I manager running on CloudLinux Server release 5.6 was missing mysqli support in php .

A client complain was issued to fix it up, e.g. install mysqli module support in the php
The server running PHP version is 5.3.6, I did quite an extensive investigation on how this can be achieved and since I found not a good way to install the mysqli through CPANEL's web management interface, I started looking ways to precompile php directly logging via ssh on the server.

After quick look on the server I've found a bunch of management scripts in server root's /scripts/ directory.
The scripts directory contains 626 really handy administration scripts which really aids and easifies many of the system administration tasks one has to do on Cpanel powered server.

Among the scripts list I've noticed the /scripts/easyapache which could be used to update the libPHP running version on the server to the latest release as well as precompile and update the Apache from source code to the latest issued Apache release on httpd.apache.org .

easyapache proofed to be dead easy, to add up the mysqli php extension to server included php, I had to:

Execute /scripts/easyapache root@hosting-server1 [~]# /scripts/easyapache


First message which "greeted" me after I launched the easyapache script was:
There were errors registered during the last build. Would you like to review them before proceeding? ;)
I just ignored the message and pressed Yes
Next an ncurses screen appears explaining what exactly the last time compile issue that emerged was, once again I just ignored the msg.

Next it's necessery to be selected the exact easyapache configuration profile to be used for the further source compile, here I used:
Previously Saved Config (** DEFAULT **)



Next an Apache version to be used by easyapache during compile needs to be choosen I choose Apache 2.2 as this is the Apache version which I would like to be compiled by the script.


Further on I pressed the [Next Step] here.

Two other screens appears asking if one PHP4 or PHP5 needs to be compiled, in my case that was php5, next I choose the latest php version which appeared as a possible option that's php 5.3.6



After this selection, the Short Options List screen appears, to select Mysqli module one needs to select on the [Exhaustive Options List] and from the list that is displayed to choose Mysql Improved Extension

Black Cat, White Cat is truly an awesome movie from Emil Kostutirca it really presents the wildness and ridiculousness of being a citizen of the farest places of Eastern Europe the Balkans.
The movie is a story of a Gipsy hamlet, located nearby the Danube. The movie is a drama, commedy, action and even more ;)
If you're looking for some movie to cheer up in about 2 hours of watching oddities and unexpected turn outs this is surely the movie for you.

The movie is one of the best movies ever made by a Slavonic origin film director.
My only objection to the movie, is towards the part presenting one Bulgarian who is being presented as a hardcore swindler and later on brutally killed and mocked.

This part is a bit too much insulting towards our Bulgarian nation and it also shows the decade hostility between our bordered nations ...

I'll skip the explanations on the movie plot and give you a small crazy scene to give you an idea on what to expect from the movie:



:)

Wonder what to do with these old monitors in the basement ?
Here is an idea ;)

Today it's the 40th day since our brother in Christ (ipodeacon) Georgi Nedev has presented his humble soul to our Saviour Jesus.

His living was as himble as his departure from this life and his passing I believe in the eternal life with God.
Georgi had the severe desire to become a monk in Holy Mount Athos and has multiple friends in there which loved him and often prayed for him.
Now on this 40 day in our Bulgarian monastery in Holy Mount Athos, Saint George - The GloryBringer (Zographus) monks will be serving a requiem service (Panihida - as we say in Slavonic)

His departure was striking and sudden for of us in the Church community here in Dobrich's Holy Trinity Church, as well as not less shocking for the Holy Mount Athos Zographus monks Christian community who loved our brother sincerely.

Some short biographic facts about our brother ipodeacon Georgi Nedev are here
Unfortunately the bio-facts I know about Georgi are very little, as I only knew him for a couple of years. Even though the short time I used to know him, I can say I was blessed through him and I'm exteremely grateful to him, it was through him I've learned a bit more about Holy Mount Athos and our Bulgarian monk community that is in Zographus, as well as some very minor details concerning the spiritual Church life that I've never thought about.
It was thanks to him I was being encouraged on numerous times in terrible times of desparation and loss of faith and track in life.

Thanks to him I was being explained for a first time, how one can go for a pilgrimage journey to Holy Mount Athos and how one can get the pilgrim's permit documentation related to going there called in greek diamontirium
He also told me about numerous miracles about Holy Mount Athos, and explained me one needs to pray to the Holy Theotokos Virgin Mary and ask her that is being allowed to enter this holy place.

This last lent, even though his sickness Georgi was regularly visiting the evening services in the Church and was dilegent in his spiritual life.

I remember him expressing his enormous joy the last time I was on a Holy Liturgy he took the communion. I asked him how is he and he answered; I'm not feeling well, but praise be to God! for I was able to take the Holy Communion

Many times when I asked him what are his future plans, he used to answer I don't know anything, it's all in the God's will (hands) for me.

You can see yourself how great his dedicated for God was by his own words.

As our priest, who used to be his confessor said, "Georgi was a righteous man and God took him early on".

Let eternal be your Memory beloved brother Georgi now and Forver and Ever! Amen!

It's the first time I'm creating a wildcard ssl certificate. It appeared there is no fundamental difference between generating a normal SSL certificate and generating a wildcard certificate.

The procedure for generating a wildcard SSL certificate is as follows:

1. Generate an SSL key file

server:~# /usr/bin/openssl genrsa -des3 -out domain.com.key 2048
Enter pass phrase for domain.com.key:


Fill in any passphrase you like, the 2048 specifies the encryption level, 2048 is good enough and is the most commonly used as of today.
I've saw there is also an option to use 4096 bits encryption but I never tried that myself, I would be glad if somebody can share if he has succesfully established an SSL certificate with 4096 encryption.

2. Generate the certificate request file

server:~# /usr/bin/openssl req -new -key /home/hipo/domain.com.key -out /home/hipo/domain.com.csr


Further on it's necessery to fill in some info concerning the newly generated webserver SSL, e.g.:

Enter pass phrase for /home/hipo/domain.com.key:
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:
Locality Name (eg, city) []:
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:
Email Address []:
Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:


Fill all the values according to your requirements, the only vital thing here is to fill in a proper Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:

The Common Name should always be equal to *.domain.com , if something else is typed in the SSL certificate won't be considered a valid one when placed on the multiple subdomains.

The newly generated domain.com.csr file should be looking something similar to:

server:~# less < domain.com.csr
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----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-----END CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----


Next on this BEGIN CERTIFICATE REQUEST will have to be filled in to the certificate issuer website, whether it's requested, let's say in GlobeSSL.

Based on the certificate request a valid SSL certificate will be issued by the SSL provider.
Here one important note to make is that if your domain contians some prohibited keywords like, let's say bank, finance, poker etc., a keywords which might be considered a fraud or forgery then probably the SSL certificate won't be issued by the SSL issuer and you will have to further contact the SSL cert provider and send them some more information related to the type of business the new website is going to run.
This kind of domain keyword filter, that is implemented by SSL certificate issuer companies is made to protect internet users from possible frauds or scam websites as well as reduce the level of potential dangerous pyramid like businesses that are so modern on the net these days.

Last step before the certificate will be visible in a browser is to set it for a domain name or virtualhost in Apache, lighttpd or whatever webser is used.
As I'm personally using it with Apache webserver, below I'll describe how to set it in Apache version 2.x.
3. Configure the newly configured SSL certificate to run on Apache virtualhost

Open up the virtualhost file which coresponds to the domain name to be secured with SSL, for example /etc/apache/sites-available/www.domain.com
Within the <Virtualhost> directives place in a code similar to:

SSLEngine on
# domain.com.crt cointains the wildcard SSL certificate generated and obtained by you from RapidSSL
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/domain.com.pem




Here the file /etc/apache2/ssl/domain.com.pem should contain both the:

----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- issued earlier in step one with openssl command, as well as:

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- which will be issued by the SSL certificate reseller.

Finally it's necessery that Apache is restarted to load the new configured certificate:

server:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart


The above described steps need to be repeated for all the wildcard subdomains which will use the multiple SSL generated certificate and hopefully if all is well tuned, the certificates should start appearing to all the web domain subdomains immediately.

Do you message when you drive? Do you know are messaging to ? ;)

I just was recommended by a friend a nifty tool, which is absoutely nifty for system administrators.

The tool is called sshsudo and the project is hosted on http://code.google.com/p/sshsudo/.

Let's say you're responsible for 10 servers with the same operating system let's say; CentOS 4 and you want to install tcpdump and vnstat on all of them without logging one by one to each of the nodes.

This task is really simple with using sshsudo.
A typical use of sshsudo is:

[root@centos root]# sshsudo -u root \
comp1,comp2,comp3,comp4,comp5,comp6,comp7,comp8,comp9,comp10 yum install tcpdump vnstat


Consequently a password prompt will appear on the screen;
Please enter your password:

If all the servers are configured to have the same administrator root password then just typing one the root password will be enough and the command will get issued on all the servers.

The program can also be used to run a custom admin script by automatically populating the script (upload the script), to all the servers and issuing it next on.

One typical use to run a custom bash shell script on ten servers would be:

[root@centos root]# sshsudo -r -u root \
comp1,comp2,comp3,comp4,comp5,comp6,comp7,comp8,comp9,comp10 /pathtoscript/script.sh
I'm glad I found this handy tool ;)

One of the contact forms running on a FreeBSD server configured to work on top of Apache+MySQL suddenly stopped working.

The errors that appeared on the webpage during a page request to the form url was:

Fatal error: Class 'SimpleXMLElement' not found in /var/www/joomla/plugins/system/plugin_googlemap2_helper.php on line 2176 Fatal error: Class 'JLoader' not found in /var/www/joomla/plugins/libraries/loader.php on line 161

As you see in the output the website which was causing the issues was running a Joomla version 1.5.23 Stable configured with RSForm!ver 1.5.x (as a contact form solution) and Google Maps version 2.13b plugins.

The Google Map from Google Maps plugin and the RSform were configured to appear on one physical configured article in Joomla and seemed to work just until now. However yesterday suddenly the error messages:
Fatal error: Class 'SimpleXMLElement' not found
Fatal error: Class 'JLoader' not found


came out of nothing, it's really strange as I don't remember doing any changes to either Joomla or the PHP installation on this server.
There is one more guy who has access to the Joomla installation which I suspect might have changed something in the Joomla, but this scenario is not very likely.

Anyways as the problem was there I had to fix it up. Obviously as the error message Fatal error: Class 'SimpleXMLElement' not found reported the server php simplexml was missing!

Just to assure myself the php simplexml extension is not present on the server I used the classical method of setting up a php file with phpinfo(); in it to check all the installed php extensions on the server.

Finally to solve the issue I had to install the module from ports php5-simplexml , e.g.:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/textproc/php5-simplexml


Afterwards to make the new settings take place I did restart of my Apache server:

freebsd# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache2 restart
Syntax OK
Stopping apache2.
Waiting for PIDS: 63883.
Performing sanity check on apache2 configuration:
Syntax OK
Starting apache2.


Now my Joomla contact form is back to normal ;)

Being a remote system administrator for many years from now, I've experienced many times sudden Linux crashes, mostly caused by system hardware overloads.

This is a common thing especially on busy Web Servers with (Apache/MySQL). Situations like this are really messy and many times in order to bringt the server back online, one has to either physically go to the Data Center or contact the Technical support to request a server reboot.

In this terrible times, data loss might occur if the Server reset button is used to cold reboot it.

Happily in 99% of the cases the data loss which might occur could be prevented with Linux's kernel capability to support the Magic SysRQ key !

Having the Magic SysRQ key functionality being supported in Linux in past times wasn't that common, thanksfully these days this has changed andlmost every Linux distrubution supports this handy feature.

Now you might wonder what is the magic with those Magic SysRQ key ?

Let me explain, Magic SysRQ is a kernel level functionality which supports even completely crashed Linux systems with the horrifying:

Kernel Panic
message to be properly shutdown.

Using Magic SysRQ instead of the mostly used indiced cold reboots is really advantageous, as all the opened files by programs on the crashed server which hanged will be properly saved and closed and thus possible data loss caused by the sudden server crash will be minimized.

One other good thing about the Magic SysRQ Key keyboard combination is that initiating the Magic SysRQ could be made blindly (no need for server monitor or display to present any error messages on the failed server).

Now to check if the magic sysrq is enabled on a server one should issue the command:

Here are some Magic SysRQ keyboard combinations one can use in case of server failure:

ALT+SYSRQ+M to dump memory info;
ALT+SYSRQ+P to dump processes states;
ALT+SYSRQ+S to sync disks;
ALT+SYSRQ+U to unmount all mounted filesystems;
ALT+SYSRQ+E to terminate processes;
ALT+SYSRQ+I to kill all processes
ALT+SYSRQ+U to try to unmount once again;
ALT+SYSRQ+B to reboot.


I would skip to explain what each of the keyboard combinations will do as I believe the above description explains it well.

One classics of combinations one might want to issue on a failed Linux server supporting the Magic SysRQ would be:

ALT+SYSRQ+R
ALT+SYSRQ+E
ALT+SYSRQ+I
ALT+SYSRQ+S
ALT+SYSRQ+U
ALT+SYSRQ+B


The ALT+SYSRQ+REISUB key combination is very popular among system administrators.
Also Magic SysRQ is heavily used by kernel developers as it includes many handy debugging options.

If you try the Magic SysRQ key on older servers and you realize it doesn't react you will have to recompile the linux kernel and enable the CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ kernel time compilation option.

The Magic SysRQ can also be initiated remotely on a properly running server by initiating:

server:~# echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger


This command would be useful if you want to just have fun and test that magic sysrq works on your system for sure ;)

To sum it up using the Magic SysRQ will guarantee your locked up, server a Safe Reboot and will hopefully save you a lot of time for backu ps recovery.

After my Debit VISA card has been declined by my Bank (had to issue a new one), which of course had a new card number and a new secret code.

Therefore to continue be able paying for domains in Godaddy I had to Update my Credit Card information in Godaddy's website.

Here is how I updated my Credit card details:

1. Login to Godaddy My Account -> Payments and Renewing Items


2. Click on Update Payment Options

Here is a screenshot with pointers of where one should go to change the payment method or update number and type of his Debit/Credit card:



After clicking on Update Payment Options, on the right side a window pane will appear titled Change Payment Type

For a newly issued bank card, to update the recent input bank card credentials, one should click on the:
Add New Payment Type:.

Change Payment Type Godaddy Menu

Further on in my case I had to select Credit Card , even though I'm using a VISA Debit card, as see in above's screenshot, there is no option of Debit card visa :).
Filling in the data and saving the changes with Save Changes completes the new bank card inclusion, I can now use my new valid card with Godaddy once again.

Just completed Arizona Dream by the famous Serbian director Emil Kosturica. The movie is starring Johny Depp an movie actor I'm not too big fan of.

The movie's plot is too cracky. It all starts and ends with scenes of some Eskimos, where it progresses and depicts later on an ordinary life of an american fisher.
As movie progresses parts of the life of a successful car sells man comes in place. Axel (Johny Depp) is the main actor. The movie revolves around the sexist element.

Some of the scenes and movie delopment looks quite unexpected. Axel starts living in a place with two beautiful woman (a mother in law and a daguther in law).
The mother in law is famous for her passion to attract and sleep with new young man. Axel fells in love and together they follow a dream of building an airplane which is supposed to be used later on as a mean to kill themselves together and according to Eskimos belief bind together their souls for eternity.
The spiritual concepts of the movie are completely messed up and clearly the movie contains references to multitude of anti-christian ideas.
The movie is generally a bit depressing as the atmosphere one can feel is a jail like. Initially Axel fells in love with the mother in law Ellaine, later on near the movie denouement, he losts his passion for Ellain which is a bit older for his age and fells in love with Grace (which is a way younger and even more attractive).

Grace has a severe problems with feeling of unvalueness and suffers with chronic depression and thus things constantly to kill her self.

Near the end of the movie Axel explains himself in love with Grace (which seems to also be in love with him).
However the ending scenes are too sad as Grace decides finally to kill herself and commits suicide with a gun ...

Honestly I expected a way more from the movie and I wouldn't recommend it as a piece of classics or a movie with some significant value.
The rest of the movies directed by Emil Kosturica seems to be a far more superior and positive than this one.
If you want to save yourself from some insanity just stay away from this cranky movie!

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 (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 ;)

These days it's ultra modern in Business Communities, that the way business is made or business possibilities are discussed are directly influenced by altered understanding of Buddhistic world views.

Today less and less people realize that the modern day Western and Eastern Christian countries are rapidly loosing their Christian mark.
It was Christianity and Christian philosophy, thanks to which Christian countries has advanced to the material goodness level, architectural greatness, science improvements and most of our civilization achievements that we the Europeans and other Western societies like Americans enjoy.

The world is constantly becoming more and more Anti-Christian. And from the times when Christianity was officially wide-spread and accepted and being a Christian was a sign for personal qualities and goodness, it's now considered to be almost a crime or being insane if you have faith in Jesus Christ as God's Son and a Saviour of mankind.

Business ethics practices from the past, which were often based on Christian ethics has also seriously changed these days.

It was due to Christianity and the Christian civillizaed society due to which we had a dozens of genuine musician like: J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Verdi, Brahms, Tschaikovsky etc. the list of great people and musicians goes innumerous here.

The Roman Catholic and Easter Orthodox Christians thanks to which works, science has advanced is also innumerous, just to name a few for instance:

Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Johannes Kepler

again this is just a small chunk of all the great Christian people who by their talents has revolutionized the world for good.

However nowdays education is changed seriously and as many people should have noticed Christianity and historic relation between science and Christianity is trying to be covered.
Moreover the historic importance of Christian faith and it's surrounding philosophy is forgotten, not to mention that officially the history of the world until the 18 century is mostly, a history of Christianity and it's influence on society.

In these days of Christian apostacy, many of the business people in their look up for ways to become superior and rule over the masses has turned into various long forgotten sects and heresies which were publicly announced by ancient Christian Church as body and soul destroying dangerous teachings.

It's trendy today that the confucionism or hindu influenced beliefs about the world and the way stuff works, are preached and used in businesses and business organizations.

It's classics nowdays that people run a business, after building a group of people, over which hierarchical manipulation based leadership is exercised.
Most oftenly people who enter into a new business field, try build a groups of people who are introduced without having conscious idea to veiled alterated buddhistic philosophy to match certain people's idea or beliefs about the world.

These groups usually consist of people ranging from hundereds to thousands. Usually each of these business groups created, has a leader who is both leader in terms of (being the group boss / executive) and also a spiritual leader.

Interaction between the group members are purely based on manipulation. People are teached they have some special sensitivity for the surrounding environment which they can develop.
They're teached they must always be positive, the group leaders (teachers) does try to suggest to the group what the group members understanding of positive should be.

In those business groups, people are taught by the leaders to be positive, while the leaders themselves are not positive (one cannot be positive without God!). People are constantly told "be positive", "be positive", while the people who teach them this are not positive at all and evil often cruel!
In other words group members are being re-taught the basics of how they perceive themselves and how they should perceive the world around them in a light that fits well with the business organization they're membering in.
Consequently people are taught to loose their ego. This is one of the most essential parts of this modern day business false teachings. In reality loosing the ego is loosing one's standing ground and through that the person in the group becomes easily manipulated by other group members.

When people loose their ego basicly they loose their protection against being easily manipulated, they loose their idea about what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong and who in reality they're.
Being exposed to this "business" approaches in that poor state one start easily accepting suggestions from the group leaders or other group members and could end up in a state where he is totally manipulated.

After time passes the group members are so much bounded together that they have to constantly meet each other and discuss things, (often senseless things), which give them the feeling of great importance or life meaning.

Consequently, when the new business group entity is tight enough, the group is instructed by the leaders about what kind of business moves will be best for each of the group individuals and the overall business the group belongs to.
At this state each of the members should obey wholeheartedly, if somebody tries to question the leadership decisions, the leader does incite the whole group members against the disobeying member and usually the members gets destroyed.

These business group building philophy is also influenced by antrophology and observence of animal behaviour's let's say coyottes or wolves.

In animal world usually each pack of wolves had their leader and the pack only attacks if the leader hits and if the whole group is together.
Same kind of thing comes to business built entities based on this loose your ego / no-ego philosophies.
A lot of pseudo beliefs about para-psychology and experimental western psychology is also involved and preached to the group members.
Loosing the ego philosophy in Business is directly influenced by buddhistic idea about Nirvana and spilling the self in the ultimate worldly reality (e.g. becoming one with the whole nature).
This kind of belief is seriously anti-christian and against the spiritual goal in christianity which is not the emptiness like in buddhism and the other eastern religions, but the goal is fullness in God.

We the Christians are striving to fill ourselves with God's Spirit - The Holy Spirit, whether buddhists are trying to empty themselves by everything that's binding them to reality (obviously they also try to empty themselves by God who has initially created man as his vessel).

Also in business, I've noticed in my experience that it's common people who are taught business in universities or are introduced to business are taught philosophies which are very typical for western buddhist teachings.
Just like in buddhism people are taught there is no absolute good or evil and there is no good and bad and everything one does is good, if he sees it as good (we're the one who define our lifes and realities)!!

Think for a while and see for yourself how insane this kind of philosophy is, let's say I kill a man who I hate, that's fine according to this philo because I believe this man's existence was not good in my view and his unexistence will make the world a better place, since I believe it's that way then it's that way DOT!!! As a Christian I must confess this is ULTIMATE INSANITY, AN ULTIMATE LIE obviously inspired by the evil which is an enemy to us the Christians as the Holy Bible teaches.

This kind of "no good and bad" philosophy is a hidden assault against our Christian roots society, faith and civillization. In Christianity we're clearly taught there is ultimate good an ultimate evil and there is no in between!
We are also taught one can become part of the ultimate good or ultimate evil by his daily choice, e.g. (get closer to God and his Holy Angels or distance himself from God and come near the devil and his fallen angels).

Mixing spirituality and business concepts has become a sad reality of our age, I've seen many books being sold which were claiming to teach, "how to do business based on Zen Buddhism" and other eastern religions and philosophies.

What's even worse is that people who are involved into this kind of "innovative" taught business approaches guarantee themselves to get exposed to the ultimate evil spirituality (devilish spiritual influence), as they openly reject God's dominion over one's self and the world around them.

The good news is that they're many Christian Business communities as I've checked online, there are many people yet who do their best to do business with other Christians or people who still keep the Christian faith and morale.

joomla install

These days very often I have to install, plain new Joomla based websites. I've realized that since there is no structured guide to follow describing the most essential plugins that every new fresh new joomla installation is required to have.
Thus I took the time and wrote this post, as it will be useful to myself in my future new joomla based websites establishment, I also believe these guide will be useful to other Joomla enthusiasts or administrators in their daily work.

Below I will describe in short the installation, configuration and oddities I've faced during installment of the above described bundle of plugins on a plan Joomla 1.5 install. These article will walk through 12 joomla essential plugins that I believe every fresh Joomla installation should be equipped with.
Hope this guide will be helpful to you. Now let's start it up:

1. JoomlaXplorer - A sophisticated web file explorer for Joomla One of the most basic plugins, one might benefit with a new joomla CMS is Joomla Xptplorer . This module enables the joomla admin to browse files in a web file explorer, on the server where the joomla CMS is installed. Below you see how handy the joomla web explorer provided by the plugin is:



Installing and using the plugin is a piece of cake. To install the plugin:

a. download Joomla file Xplorer from here or from the official plugin website.

b. Install the plugin through the admin joomla menu:

Extensions -> Install/Uninstall


c. Start using the newly installed plugin by following to menus:

Components -> eXtplorer


2. JCrawler Generate easily sitemap.xml to aim the overall Joomla website SEO optimization I have previously written a very through tutorial on how to install configure and generate website sitemap with Jcrawler module, You can read my article titled: How to build website sitemap.xml in Joomla here

3. sh404SEF - Make your Joomla links and content more user friendly sh404SEF is a great Joomla plugin, which will seriously improve SEO and could contribute well for a website to be better indexed with major search engines.

I have previously written an article describing thoroughfully the install and use procedures for the module.
You can read the article Making your Joomla URLS Google friendly with sh404sef plugin / Simple Joomla link SEO here

4. Akeeba Backup Joomla solution Installing a joomla backup solution is very essential if you does take care about your data, it often happens that server hard disk got crashes or a RAID massives got corrupted or some kind of other unexpected disaster hits the server. In these terrible times, having a website backup will save you nerves and data recovery funds, not to mention that in many cases data recovery is impossible.

Joomla has a very easy to use software for creating full website backup called Akeeba Backup

To start using the software one must:

a. Download Akeeba Backup and install it via:

Extensions -> Install/Uninstall


After the Akeeba Backup installation is over, to create your first backup, one needs to navigate to:

Components -> Akeeba Backup -> Backup Now


Each Akeeba backup (a version of the website's files data and sql info) will be created in an archive file with the extension .jpa
The backup files are created under joomla's website (main) root directory in directory location administrator/components/com_akeeba/backup

The Akeeba plugin also has capabilities to recover a (.jpa) backup restore point easily.
To recover a backup with the Akeeba plugin one needs to do it once again, via the plugin joomla web interface.
5. Google Analytics (place easy tracking code) in Joomla a. Download the Google Analytics Tracking Module
The module is available from Joomla Extensions on joomla.org

At the current time of writting you need to download the analytics_tracking15,zip file

b. Install the Google Analytics Tracking Module;
Login as joomla admin and navigate to;

Extensions -> Install


Place the analytics_tracking15.zip url to the Install URL: field.
Again as of time of writting you need to place http://pc-freak.net/files/analytics_tracking15.zip;

c. Open the Module Manager

Extensions -> Module Manager


d. Click over Google Analytics Tracking Module
On the right pane you will notice in the Module Parameters the Analytics_uacct_code field. In the uacct_code field you need to paste your UA obtained from your created google-analytics account.
This code is usually something like UA-2101595-10
Now place your code their and press the save green button located near the right top of the screen. You should see the text in blue Item Saved which would indicate your UA code is stored already in the Google Analytics Tracking Module, now press the Cancel button located again on the right top.
As a last step before the Google analytics is set-up on the Joomla you need to enable the plugin to do you need to press over the tick left sided from the text reading Google Analytics Tracking Module in the Module Manager
e. Click over the Enabled button in Module Manager;
Google Analytics Tracking Module -> Enabled


6. Itprism (Facebook, Twitter etc.) Social Network share buttons Joomla plugin a. to add the itpsocialbuttons to joomla Download the Itpsocialbuttons latest module files from http://itprism.com/free-joomla-extensions/social-buttons-plugin or use my mirrored module files below:

Download mod_itpsocialbuttons .zip file
Download plg_itpsocialbuttons .zip

After having the two files necessery to be installed to make the ITPSocialButtons appear on website, installation is done like with any other installation:

Extensions -> Install/Uninstall -> Upload Package File (Choose File)


Next its necessery to configure the plugin to do so, follow to menus:

Extensions -> Module Manager -> Share


You will notice the Share dialog in the list of Module Name column in Module Manager

Here is a screenshot on how the settings options for ITpsocialbuttons will look like:



The options which I personally changed was:

Show Title - I set this one to No as I wanted to omit the plugin title text to appear on my website.
Further on I've set the Enabled option to Yes to enable the plugin and choose the buttons Style option to be of a Small buttons type.
I've also found that the most suitable position for the Social Share buttons were to be of a right - Position .

Here is how the social network itprism share buttons looks like:



The plugin supports sharing of joomla pages to the following list of social networks:

• Delicios.com
• Digg.com
• Facebook
• Google Bookmarks
• StumbleUpon
• Technorati
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

The module configuration, also allows the user to configure the type of social network buttons, one wants to display on the website.

7. Joomla JCE Content Editor This content editor is really awesome compared to the default editor TinyMCE. If you want to have an options rich content editor for Joomla, then this is the one for you :)
download JCE Content Editor here

After installing the JCE Joomla content editor in order to enable it as a default editor you need to go to the following location:

Site -> Global Configuration -> Default WYSIWYG Editor



There place on Editor TinyMCE and change it with Editor - JCE

Now go to edit some article, and you will see the difference in the editor :)

8. Add gallery Joomla capabilities with sigplus (Image Gallery Plus) and Very Simple Image Gallery

sigplus Image Gallery Plus is a straightforward way to add image or photo galleries to a Joomla article with a simple syntax. It takes a matter of minutes to set up a gallery but those who are looking for a powerful gallery solution will not be disappointed either: sigplus is suitable for both beginner and advanced users.

Download Sigplus Joomla Image Gallery plugin here
Using sigllus is quite easy all one has to do is use Joomla Media Manager from links:

Site -> Media Manager


Create new folder in the stories folder, let's say New Pictures and further on use Media Manager to upload all desired pictures to be later displayed.

Being done with uploading the images you want to display, go to Article Manager :

Content -> Article Manager


From there choose your article where new uploaded pictures you want to display and type in the article:

{gallery}New Pictures{/gallery}.


Note that New Pictures is the directory just recently created as stated below, it's important that there is no spacing between {gallery}and New Pictures, if one tries {gallery} New Pictures {/gallery} instead of {gallery}New Pictures{/gallery} an error will occur instead of the pictures being displayed in a scrolled gallery.

Sigplus Image Gallery has also a number of configuration options, which might make it look a bit more decent.
I have to say in my view the default way sigplus displays pictures is awful!

Another alternative if you don't like Sigplus 's way of creating new galleries is to use Very Simple Image Gallery
UYou can download Very simple image gallery here

After installing the plugin. It's use is analogous to the Sigplus . To use it likewise sigplus create new directory through Media Manager and in stories and upload your files in let's say New Pictures1 . Later on in your article place, the code

{vsig}New Pictures1{/vsig}

Gallery will be generated automatically by the plugin. I think Simple Image Gallery is a bit more advanced and gives a better outlook to Galleries, though it's configuration settings are much less than with SigPlus image gallery.

To add pictures comments e.g. img link alt='' and title='' tib you need to place a code within the Article manager similar to:

{vsig_c}0|Picture_1.JPG|Some sample text|Some other text{/vsig_c}
{vsig_c}0|Picture_2.JPG|Some example text|Some text{/vsig_c}
etc. ..


Note that the 0 in above example specifies the gallery number if you for instance are using a couple of galleries with Simple Image Gallery , the first one you used would be call 0 . The text specified as comments to the picture will also appear after you preview the gallery right below the picture when clicked on as a picture description in a really nice way.
9. Install Google maps plugin for Joomla

It's a wise idea that every website has a location map on it's website, for that reason Google maps is just great.
To install Google maps capability to joomla one can use a plugin called Google Maps .

You can straighly download Joomla's Googlemap plugin from here

Afterwards use Extension Manager to install the plugin e.g. follow:

Extensions -&gr; Install/Uninstall (Choose File)


and click on Upload File & Install button.

To further enable and configure the Joomla Googlemap plugin you will have to go to the location:

Extensions -> Plugin Manager


Therein you will have to find and enable the Google Maps plugin which is to be found in the column named Plugin Manager
On my Joomla installation the plugin was located in the second page with modules, so if you don't find the module on the listing with modules on the first page, make sure you scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Next button.

Therein in the list you will most likely notice Google Maps use the Enable button to enable it.

Next step is to configure the plugin, to do so press on the plugin name Google Maps
All configuration necessery here is to place Googlemaps API Key in the respective field (you will see it among config options).

Issuing a new Google Maps api key takes just few seconds, if you already have a gmail account just go to http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html and take few seconds to issue the key.

You will get the key right on your gmail account after being issued (to repeat myself issuing takes few seconds so no worrier here).

One more Once having the key place it in the Googlemaps API Key field and configuring Address (which is one of the list of many options the plugin provides) you will be done with configuration.

To display a google map the location you just configured go to the Article Manager , select the article where you want the google maps location picture of your address to appear and type in the Article:

{mosmap|text='Exact street address location'|zoom='15'|zoomType='Large'|zoomNew='0'}


After you save the article a very nice Google map showing you the location's streets will appear.
You can further conifgure a number of things related to the google map to appear, one thing you might want to play with is the zoom option which as you see in below's code is equal to 15, e.g. zoom='15'
Set it to another one if you want to regulate your googlemaps zoom level. For more thoroughful options take a look at the extensive plugin documentation.

10. Joomla Xmap (generating static HTML sitemap) Download Xmap from here , install it the usual plugin way.

Right after installation on the plugin succesful install screen you will notice the link component menu .
Clicking on the component menu you will be leaded to a page showing you few links Sitemap's URL :

• XML Sitemap:
• HTML Sitemap:
• News Sitemap:
• Images Sitemap:

11. Add Joomla donate Paypal capabilities with Joomla PAYPAL DONATION MODULE

Just recently I've written a a post on how to add a paypal donation capabilities to joomla, you can read my previous post here

12. Install Joomla RSForms Module (Advanced Joomla Forms Support)

If you're planning to add a complicated form support for Joomla, there are plenty of plugins, however one that was suggested by a friend of mine which is deep in Joomla world and moreover works good on my joomla installations is RSForms

Joomla - RSForms! is free to download and has great and easy interface to create new joomla forms.

At the time of writting I use these three RSForms components on new Joomla installations:

RSform Pro 1.1.0 com
Mod RsForm for Joomla 1.5
Mod Rsform list for Joomla

For latest release of RSForms! use the link http://www.rsjoomla.com/joomla-components/rsform.html

Installation is like any other module and is done through Extensions -> Install/Uninstall menu.

After installation, setting up a new form is available from the Joomla Menus:

Components -> RSform!Pro -> Manage Forms

I would not enter in details on how to edit the default RSForms or create a new RSForm. Just take some time and learn it by trying ;)

After the rsform is ready, to enable the new form, navigate to Joomla menus:

Menus -> Main Menu


Press the New button located in the buttons bar nearby the page header in the list of options in Select Menu item Type you will notice the RSForm!Pro as an option, press on it to establish the new form in the menus.

A follow up window will appear where one can set a Title: and Alias: for the new form as well as few other options.
After finalizing the settings press on Apply button to save the settings and the new form should appear in Joomla.


Probably there are many more handy plugins, which I'm missing here thus I'll be glad if readers suggest some more helpful essential (must have plugins) for Joomla.
Feedback on this tutorial is very welcome!
Looking forward to hear for your opinions if my article was helpful to you ;)