Posts Tagged ‘online’
Monday, March 26th, 2012 
I had to install two PHPBB based internet forums, some long time ago. Since long time passed and I haven't checked what's happening with them I just noticed. They start filling up spam threads. The phpbb installations are done using the standard shipped deb packages in Debian Linux Lenny.
After checking online, I found one smart solution to . The idea is very simple most spam bots are written in a way that they don't have a properly set timezone. Therefore the quickest way to get rid of spam bots which try to auto register and put spam content inside the a forum category or post is to add a simple if condition in php to check the browser set timezone:
The file to add the php if condition is ucp_register.phpThe phpbb package install places default phpbb path on Debian is /usr/share/phpbb3/ and hence the file I had to modify is located in:
/usr/share/phpbb3/www/includes/ucp/ucp_register.php
To make the TZ check one needs to modify ../www/includes/ucp/ucp_register.php and look for php array definition:
$data = array(
'username' => utf8_normalize_nfc(request_var('username', '', true)),
'new_password' => request_var('new_password', '', true),
'password_confirm' => request_var('password_confirm', '', true),
'email' => strtolower(request_var('email', '')),
'email_confirm' => strtolower(request_var('email_confirm', '')),
'confirm_code' => request_var('confirm_code', ''),
'lang' => basename(request_var('lang', $user->lang_name)),
'tz' => request_var('tz', (float) $timezone),
);
Right after this chunk of code add the if condition code which is like so:
if ($data['tz'] == '-12.00')
{
die('Die, bot! Die.');
}
From now onwards, any attempt for new user registration with an incorrect timezone of -12.00 will be immediately stopped while the forum spammer bot will be offered an empty page 🙂
Another good practice is to disable Birthday Listing from phpbb Admin Control panel (ACP). Go to menus:
ACP -> General -> Board Settings -> Enable Birthday listing: (No)
I like disabling birthday listing, as when it is enabled and you have some spammer registrations, which even though didn't succeeded to contaminate your forum content has specified a birthday and therefore there profiles gets popping up each different day on the main page of the forum.
This will not eradicate all spammer bots, but at least will significantly decrease spammer bot registrations.
Tags: array definition, Auto, checking, chunk, code 39, deb, deb packages, Debian, debian gnu, debian linux, Draft, email, forum, forum category, GNU, Internet, internet forum, internet forums, Linux, long time, online, PHPBB, smart solution, solution, spam, spam bots, threads, time
Posted in System Administration, Web and CMS | No Comments »
Monday, July 30th, 2007 The weekend was disastrous. A lot of problems with Valueweb. Missing servers online, missing information about them hard times connecting with their technical support. Lack of information about what’s happening server outages. Using backups of sites changing DNS-es … this is a simple sample of what’s happening and continues to some degree with our servers. Valueweb are a really terrible choice for a Dedicated hosting. But we started with them before so much time it’s hard to change the provider easily. At least the mail server is working normally now. Thanks to God at least I’m provided with ernergy to work, think and fix things Intensively. As Usual PRAISE THE LORD ! :] Hope everything would be back to normal in a few days period. END—–
Tags: backups, choice, Dedicated, degree, end, ernergy, everything, few days, god, Hope, information, Intensively, Lack, mail, mail server, Missing, online, period, Praise, provider, sample, server outages, servers, support, technical support, time, weekend
Posted in Everyday Life | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 To change the Main Menu link menu entry in Joomla, from Joomla administ rator I tried to:
Menus -> Main Menu -> Menus
I’ve changed the title but the change didn’t appeared in my Joomla based website .
I tried to change it directly in the source code of the website by looking for ‘Main Menu’ string with:
debian:/home/mysite/www# grep -rli 'Main Menu' *
but it appeared too complicated and after trying few string changes in few files I decided to drop this kind of approach.
A bit of investigation online led me to how to achieve what I was trying to dire ctly from Joomla.
Here is how. In Joomla administrator move to:
Extensions -> Module Manager
In the list you will the Module Manager appear under the list Module Name , therein you have to click over Main Menu text and change it to whatever you like to.
The new text you entered will appear on the joomla website immediately, enjoy.
Tags: administ, change, Click, grep, home, How to change from default main menu to other text in Joomla, investigation, kind, link, link menu, Main, menu, menu entry, menu link, menu text, menus, Module, move, mysite, online, rator, rli, source code, string changes, text, title, website, www
Posted in Joomla, Linux, SEO | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, April 5th, 2011 For a number of time I’ve been planning to change my blog comments placement. Until this very day however I’ve kept the default wordpress theme’s Comments button placement.
I realize the default Comments button placement is a bit hard to see and not that much intuitive for the user that enters my blog for a first time.
My first guess was that there might be somewhere a wordpress plugin which will allow me to adjust my comments button placement.
After some research online and a realization that probably there is no such plugin existing yet. I’ve forced myself to tune it up myself.
It was clear to me that in order to change the it will be necessery to edit the WordPress templates files. I’m not a designer and when I hear about templates I usually get scared, however I took the time to take a look at the default wordpress template and find out actually that template modifications is actually rather easier than I thought.
My previous idea was that in order to edit templates you have to be some kind of CSS and HTML guru (which I’m not). Nevertheless it seems that in order to play and adjust in a good way the templates you don’t need ot be a pro.
Even an uneducated fool like myself can easily do almost everything he thinks of throughout few lines of code in the wp templates.
To get back to the major topic thanks God after a bit of review and reading of wordpress.org documentation and some user forums. I’ve figured out that in order to change my Comments placement you need to modify the file:
- blog/wp-content/themes/default/index.php
In index.php find the line starting with:
You will notice within this opened paragraph the php code:
<?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '
'); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?>
| <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?>
<?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?>
This is the actual default theme php code that makes the wordpress Comments or No Comments that maes the comments appear on the blog.
Now I’ve decided to let this be as it is but add one more Comment button to wordpress on a different location that is more appealing to my blog visitors
After quick evaluation I’ve determined that probably the best location that the Comments button should have is right after the end of the post text
If you think my idea for button placement is appropriate, to set this location for the Comments button, you will have to find the follwoing code in index.php:
<div class="entry">
<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>
</div>
Right after the end of this code place the following code:
<?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?>
</div>
Tags: amp, Auto, blog, Button, button placement, code lt, Comment, content themes, CSS, default theme, Draft, everything, file, fool, god, guess, guru, HTML, idea, index, kind, line, link, location, lt, nbsp, necessery, online, order, org, paragraph, php, php code, place, placement, plugin, quot, reading, realization, right, template, text, textIf, time, topic, way, Wordpress, wordpress plugin, wordpress templates
Posted in Various, Web and CMS, Wordpress | 1 Comment »
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 .
Tags: apache, apache configuration, apc, blog, browser, cause, conf, config, configured, correct location, domain, error messages, freebsd, function, gnu linux, httpd, idea, ini, level, line, line 6, Linux, location, memory, OffThese, online, php cache, php error, pool, reading, scripts, time, virtualhost section, Warning, Wordpress, wordpress blog, www, www data
Posted in System Administration, Various, Wordpress | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 24th, 2011 I needed to link a new created WordPress Post to external web page address. So when one clicks over the created post he opens an external website.
I’ve googled around to see how this can be achieved and found ordpress external links plugin
I gave a go of the plugin, but pitily I couldn’t make it work. I decided to try some other methods and after some time I tried another approach. I used the HTML >a href=””< My Post Title </a> as a title and it appeared this simple method prooved working 😉
Here is a small screenshot, from wordpress Add New Post dialog
By the way the information online I’ve found on how this the external link creation for a Page or a Post is made was quite obscure and messy. i wonder why there is no clear explanation on the direct a href link creation, especially since WordPress is a de-facto standard for a blogging platform and nowdays powers up so many websites engines around the world.
Tags: creation, de facto standard, dialog, external url, external web, href, href link, HTML, information, link, link creation, lt, nowdays, online, page, platform, plugin, post, quot, screenshot, standard, time, url, way, web page address, Wonder, Wordpress, working
Posted in Linux, Various, Web and CMS, Wordpress | 3 Comments »
Friday, October 28th, 2011 One of the qmail servers I manage today has started returning strange errors in Squirrel webmail and via POP3/IMAP connections with Thunderbird.
What was rather strange is if the email doesn’t contain a link to a webpage or and attachment, e.g. mail consists of just plain text the mail was sent properly, if not however it failed to sent with an error message of:
Requested action aborted: error in processing Server replied: 451 qq temporary problem (#4.3.0)
After looking up in the logs and some quick search in Google, I come across some online threads reporting that the whole issues are caused by malfunction of the qmail-scanner.pl (script checking mail for viruses).
After a close examination on what is happening I found out /usr/sbin/clamd was not running at all?!
Then I remembered a bit earlier I applied some updates on the server with apt-get update && apt-get upgrade , some of the packages which were updated were exactly clamav-daemon and clamav-freshclam .
Hence, the reason for the error:
451 qq temporary problem (#4.3.0)
was pretty obvious qmail-scanner.pl which is using the clamd daemon to check incoming and outgoing mail for viruses failed to respond, so any mail which contained any content which needed to go through clamd for a check and returned back to qmail-scanner.pl did not make it and therefore qmail returned the weird error message.
Apparently for some reason apparently the earlier update of clamav-daemon failed to properly restart, the init script /etc/init.d/clamav-daemon .
Following fix was very simple all I had to do is launch clamav-daemon again:
linux:~# /etc/inid.d/clamav-daemon restart
Afterwards the error is gone and all mails worked just fine 😉
Tags: action, amp, cause and solution, checking, Clamav, clamd, daemon, email, examination, fine, fix, g mail, google, imap connections, init script, link, logs, mail, online, outgoing mail, pl script, processing, Qmail, qq, reason, Requested, scanner, Search, servers, solution, Squirrel, strange errors, Thunderbird, today, update, usr, Viruses, weird error message
Posted in Linux, Qmail, System Administration | No Comments »
Friday, September 30th, 2011 
If you're looking for a command line utility to generate PDF file out of any webpage located online you are looking for Wkhtmltopdf
The conversion of webpages to PDF by the tool is done using Apple's Webkit open source render.
wkhtmltopdf is something very useful for web developers, as some webpages has a requirement to produce dynamically pdfs from a remote website locations.
wkhtmltopdf is shipped with Debian Squeeze 6 and latest Ubuntu Linux versions and still not entered in Fedora and CentOS repositories.
To use wkhtmltopdf on Debian / Ubuntu distros install it via apt;
linux:~# apt-get install wkhtmltodpf
...
Next to convert a webpage of choice use cmd:
linux:~$ wkhtmltopdf www.pc-freak.net www.pc-freak.net_website.pdf
Loading page (1/2)
Printing pages (2/2)
Done
If the web page to be snapshotted in long few pages a few pages PDF will be generated by wkhtmltopdf
wkhtmltopdf also supports to create the website snapshot with a specified orientation Landscape / Portrait
-O Portrait options to it, like so:
linux:~$ wkhtmltopdf -O Portrait www.pc-freak.net www.pc-freak.net_website.pdf
wkhtmltopdf has many useful options, here are some of them:
- Javascript disabling – Disable support for javascript for a website
- Grayscale pdf generation – Generates PDf in Grayscale
- Low quality pdf generation – Useful to shrink the output size of generated pdf size
- Set PDF page size – (A4, Letter etc.)
- Add zoom to the generated pdf content
- Support for password HTTP authentication
- Support to use the tool over a proxy
- Generation of Table of Content based on titles (only in static version)
- Adding of Header and Footers (only in static version)
To generate an A4 page with wkhtmltopdf:
wkhtmltopdf -s A4 www.pc-freak.net/blog/ www.pc-freak.net_blog.pdf
wkhtmltopdf looks promising but seems a bit buggy still, here is what happened when I tried to create a pdf without setting an A4 page formatting:
linux:$ wkhtmltopdf www.pc-freak.net/blog/ www.pc-freak.net_blog.pdf
Loading page (1/2)
OpenOffice path before fixup is '/usr/lib/openoffice' ] 71%
OpenOffice path is '/usr/lib/openoffice'
OpenOffice path before fixup is '/usr/lib/openoffice'
OpenOffice path is '/usr/lib/openoffice'
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (:12057): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
Printing pages (2/2)
Done
Printing pages (2/2)
Segmentation fault
Debian and Ubuntu version of wkhtmltopdf does not support TOC generation and Adding headers and footers, to support it one has to download and install the static version of wkhtmltopdf
Using the static version of the tool is also the only option for anyone on Fedora or any other RPM based Linux distro.
Tags: apple, authentication support, CentOS, choice, command, command line utility, content support, conversion, DEBUG, DoneIf, fedora, freak, generation, gnu linux, Grayscale, Initialize, Javascript, Landscape, landscape portrait, line, Linux, linux versions, loading page, low quality, nbsp, online, Open, open source, OpenOffice, orientation, page, password, PDF, pdf content, pdf size, portrait options, printing, quality pdf, repositories, requirement, Set, size a4, snapshot, something, squeeze, static version, support, table of content, tool, Ubuntu, use, Useful, web developers, web page, Webkit, webpage, www
Posted in Linux Audio & Video, System Administration, Various, Web and CMS | 2 Comments »
Monday, September 26th, 2011 
A friend of mine gave me a VCD with some coptic Orthodox Christian exorcism, where there pope was chasing some evil spirits from possessed muslims who came to the Coptic Orthodox Church in egypt. The video was made to be in VCD and as you can expect this did not worked out of the box with Totem and VLC out of the box.
Putting in the VCD video inside my cdrom poped up an error like the one in the header of the post.
In order to make the video play I had to use the old school and now a bit obsolete mplayer.
Hence in order to play the VCD on Debian Linux I had to install mplayer and w32codecs packages first e.g.:
debian:~# apt-get update && apt-get install mplayer w32codecs
Second to play the video from gnome-terminal, I had to switch to the mounted cdrom location /media/cdrom0 and launch the video with mplayer cmd like so:
debian:~$ cd /media/cdrom0/vcd
debian:/media/cdrom0/vcd$ mplayer vcd://2
...
In some cases it might be necessery to play the video with mplayer command like:
debian:/media/cdrom0/vdd$ mplayer vcd://2 vcd://3
Watching it with mplayer from console has some downsides as I couldn’t make the fast rewind work, but still it’s way better than nothing.
Too bad in Debian Squeeze 6 gmplayer is no longer installable. The gmplayer can probably be installed if mplayer is compiled from source, but I’m too lazy to try it out.
I’ve red also in some forums online that gxine is capable of playing the VCD play nice, but I couldn’t install it from my existing Debian repositories so I did not give it a go.
Tags: cd media, cmd, codecsSecond, command, coptic orthodox christian, coptic orthodox church, Debian, debian cd, debian linux, debian repositories, ERROR, evil spirits, exorcism, fast rewind, gmplayer, Gnome, gxine, location, mine, mplayer, muslims, necessery, old school, online, order, poped, post, rewind, squeeze, totem, update, VCD, vdd, video, video play, VLC, way, work
Posted in Entertainment, Everyday Life, Linux Audio & Video, Various | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, August 24th, 2011 While I was deploying a new Nagios install to Monitor some Windows hosts I’ve came across the following error in Nagios’s web interface:
Sorry, but Nagios is currently not checking for external commands, so your command will not be committed!
Read the documentation for information on how to enable external commands...
This error is caused by an option configuration for /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg (part of the nrpe-nagios-server Debian package.
The config variable in nrpe.cfg causing the error is check_external_command=0 , the fix comes to changing the variable to:
check_external_command=1
As well as restart the /etc/init.d/nagios-nrpe-server and /etc/init.d/nagios3 services:
debian:~# /etc/init.d/nagios3 restart
...
debian:~# /etc/init.d/nagios-nrpe-server
...
This changes has work out the error Sorry, but Nagios is currently not checking for external commands, so your command will not be committed! , however immediately after another kind of error appared in Nagios web interface when I tried to use the send Nagios commands button. The error was:
Error: Could not stat() command file '/var/lib/nagios3/rw/nagios.cmd'!
This error is due to a deb package, which seems to be affecting the current deb versions of Nagios shipped with Debian 6 Squeeze stable, as well as the Latest Ubuntu release 11.04.
Thanksfully there is a work around to the problem I found online, to fix it up I had to execute the commands:
debian:~# /etc/init.d/nagios3 stop debian:~# dpkg-statoverride --update --add nagios www-data 2710 /var/lib/nagios3/rw
debian:~# dpkg-statoverride --update --add nagios nagios 751 /var/lib/nagios3
debian:~# /etc/init.d/nagios3 start
And hooray Thanks God the error is gone 😉
Tags: Button, check, checking, command, config, deb, deb package, dpkg, ERROR, file, god, hooray, information, kind, lib, monitor, nagios, online, option, package, squeeze, Stable, stat, Thanksfully, Ubuntu, var, web interface, work, www data
Posted in Linux, System Administration | 8 Comments »
How to change default Comments and No Comments location in WordPress in wordpress default theme
Tuesday, April 5th, 2011For a number of time I’ve been planning to change my blog comments placement. Until this very day however I’ve kept the default wordpress theme’s Comments button placement.
I realize the default Comments button placement is a bit hard to see and not that much intuitive for the user that enters my blog for a first time.
My first guess was that there might be somewhere a wordpress plugin which will allow me to adjust my comments button placement.
After some research online and a realization that probably there is no such plugin existing yet. I’ve forced myself to tune it up myself.
It was clear to me that in order to change the it will be necessery to edit the WordPress templates files. I’m not a designer and when I hear about templates I usually get scared, however I took the time to take a look at the default wordpress template and find out actually that template modifications is actually rather easier than I thought.
My previous idea was that in order to edit templates you have to be some kind of CSS and HTML guru (which I’m not). Nevertheless it seems that in order to play and adjust in a good way the templates you don’t need ot be a pro.
Even an uneducated fool like myself can easily do almost everything he thinks of throughout few lines of code in the wp templates.
To get back to the major topic thanks God after a bit of review and reading of wordpress.org documentation and some user forums. I’ve figured out that in order to change my Comments placement you need to modify the file:
In index.php find the line starting with:
You will notice within this opened paragraph the php code:
<?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', ''); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?>
| <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?>
<?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?>
This is the actual default theme php code that makes the wordpress Comments or No Comments that maes the comments appear on the blog.
Now I’ve decided to let this be as it is but add one more Comment button to wordpress on a different location that is more appealing to my blog visitors
After quick evaluation I’ve determined that probably the best location that the Comments button should have is right after the end of the post text
If you think my idea for button placement is appropriate, to set this location for the Comments button, you will have to find the follwoing code in index.php:
<div class="entry"><?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>
</div>
Right after the end of this code place the following code:
<?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?></div>
Tags: amp, Auto, blog, Button, button placement, code lt, Comment, content themes, CSS, default theme, Draft, everything, file, fool, god, guess, guru, HTML, idea, index, kind, line, link, location, lt, nbsp, necessery, online, order, org, paragraph, php, php code, place, placement, plugin, quot, reading, realization, right, template, text, textIf, time, topic, way, Wordpress, wordpress plugin, wordpress templates
Posted in Various, Web and CMS, Wordpress | 1 Comment »