ApacheFriends XAMPP makes Apache setup easy

I've been using XAMPP on Windows (which I'm forced to use at work) for a few years. I write a lot of custom PHP stuff to help me with my day job, and I also like to test functions or classes I write before I push it out to production. ApacheFriends XAMPP is an easy way to get a basic Apache installation up and running with some of the most popular add-ons including PHP and MySQL. It installs in OS X and many Linux distributions as well.

While nothing can replace a streamlined, custom-compiled AMP Stack set up just the way you need it, XAMPP affords busy sysadmins (and web developers that don't want to be sysadmins!) the ability to get a functional web dev environment up and running with ease.

Go ahead, give XAMPP a shot!

Asmodian's Workbench

Whats on Asmodian's workbench?
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Google mini
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The Google-mini is an Internet search appliance. It is essentially a 1u Intel server with Googles search engine with a simple web based interface to specify what sites it should index. The mini lacks the capability to access anything but web or samba based resources. To this end they have a feature called a Onebox.

A Onebox module is an XML profile describing what to do if a certain set or format of keywords are encountered during a query. The definition then tells Google to access a certain collection or an external script which then is sent the query and any applicable authentication information and expects back an XML response. The response is pared with an XSLT style sheet and displayed with the search results.

The Onebox can search queries by key words, Perl regular expressions or on every search.
The example they made was an employee directory which searched by lastname and returned basic contact information in a formated box with a graphic.

Informative resources:
Google Inc. "One Box Guide". Accessed 2-18-2008
http://code.google.com/enterprise/documentation/oneboxguide.html
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Pure-FTPd Follow up.
I am working on an adaptation of my previous article on Pure-FTP using Mysql as the user database and creating an automated user web space system, or adapting an existing one.

I am in a situation where I have user information sitting in LDAP (via Novell NDS) however I cannot implement my own schema so I must use a Mysql back end to store the user information.

So what I plan on doing is setting up the interface to poll LDAP for user info and import it into the authentication database.

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iPOD Touch Hassle
It seems I am cursed to buy the one technological widget which is resistant to modification.
It appears that the new iPOD's purchased since December 2007 are resistant to Jail breaking.

Worst yet, information on this is buried amongst a deluge of you tube videos and un-readable Interweb BLAG's with a crap ton of advertisements so that searching for helpful information is an all night task. I'll tell you what doesn't work:

Upgrading to the 1.1.1 firmware via Itunes 7.5+ (Mac and PC)

Though it has been a learning experience:
The iPOD touch /iPhone uses a Arm processor some where around 500Mhz.

You can access the media folders on the iPOD via iPHUC. However on a standard iPOD this dumps you into a chrooted folder (/var/root/media)

The downgrade/jailbreak process goes like this 1.) Get the old firmware 2.) Put it into recovery mode(see above) 3.)Use iTunes to load the old firmware 4.)on your ipod goto the site with the giant tiff with the overflow info and payload. 5.) It will load the program installer.

Then theres some tricks to upgrade the iPOD back to the latest firmware while keeping the ability to load 3rd party software.

Like I said, this has not been working.

You can resurrect a "bricked" iPOD or iPhone by holding in the Sleep button and the home button then letting go of the sleep button when you see the apple logo. Then you should see the iTunes logo and the iPOD cable symbols. Attach it to iTunes and then restore the firmware. (This wipes out EVERYTHING).

I understand that if the boot loader is corrupted or overwritten with an incompatible version there is a way to reload it too but I haven't seen any articles with sufficient details on this.

Informative Resources:
ARM web page. "ARM Powered Products". Accessed 2-18-2008 http://www.arm.com/markets/mobile_solutions/armpp/18665.html

Johnstone, Jeremy. "Howto: Run custom apps on iPhone (Part #1)" Accessed 2-18-2008
http://www.jeremyjohnstone.com/blog/archives/2007/08/05/howto-run-custom-apps-on-iphone-part-1/
*This describes a utility called iPhuc and has little to do with the iPOD touch

ilounge.com. "white screen lockup", Accessed 2-18-2008
http://forums.ilounge.com/archive/index.php/t-209541.html
*This references a couple of Youtube videos on updating the firmware.

iPHUC Homepage, "iPHUC" Accessed 2-18-2008
http://code.google.com/p/iphuc/
*iPhuc gives you an interactive (albet chrooted) shell to your iPhone or iPOD.

True, Nathan. "ibrickr" Accessed 2-18-2008
http://cre.ations.net/creation/ibrickr
*The iBrickr application is very handy in even though it's meant for the iPhone.
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Sysadmin Sunday: OpenBSD, Apache, MySQL, PHP (OAMP?)

Editor's note: I know, I know.  This is SATURDAY!  But I'm putting this out there for a good reason.  Today is also KC PHP User's Group's first meeting of 2008, and what better way to kick off the KCPUG new year than with some fresh AMP-Stack Content.  So, here we go.  

Last week, I discussed how OpenBSD sysadmins can make their lives a little easier with some software I wrote. This week on Sysadmin Sunday, I'll show you how easy it is to get a decent AMP (Apache, MySQL and PHP) environment up and running on OpenBSD 4.2, which is the current version as of writing.

It used to be that some stuff had to be compiled by hand to make everything work just right, but the package/port guys finally nailed it. With the help of obsd_pkgscripts, OAMP is a breeze. The benefits of running your AMP-driven website atop OpenBSD are many, not the least of which are the facts that it's a minimalistic, secure, and high-performance platform out of the box.

OpenBSD already ships with Apache. It's a patched and tweaked version of Apache, but it's Apache all the same. You're already halfway to OAMP land with OpenBSD and Apache installed out of the box.

First, install the MySQL Server. I obviously chose to use my pkg_get.sh tool for this, but it's not needed.

$ pkg_get.sh mysql-server
Attempting to fetch/install package...
mysql-client-5.0.45: complete
p5-DBD-mysql-3.0008:p5-Net-Daemon-0.39: complete
p5-DBD-mysql-3.0008:p5-PlRPC-0.2018p0: complete
p5-DBD-mysql-3.0008:p5-DBI-1.53: complete
p5-DBD-mysql-3.0008: complete
mysql-server-5.0.45: complete
--- mysql-server-5.0.45 -------------------
You can find detailed instructions on how to install a database
in /usr/local/share/doc/mysql/README.OpenBSD.

Next, that README contains some useful information for more advanced installations and performance, but summarized, follow these instructions. I use sudo, and rarely use the root account. I recommend doing the same.

Create the DB:

-bash-3.2$ sudo /usr/local/bin/mysql_install_db

Start MySQL:

-bash-3.2$ sudo /usr/local/share/mysql/mysql.server start

To make MySQL Start up at boot, add the above mysql startup line to /etc/rc.local without the "sudo" at the beginning (optional but highly recommended). There is a "theoretically correct" start-up snippit on the documentation, but I've found this works just as well.

Set a password for mysql's root user (choose a better one than this):

-bash-3.2$ sudo /usr/local/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'

That's pretty much it as far as getting MySQL up and running is concerned. Now we just need to get PHP installed with the MySQL client library...

-bash-3.2$ sudo pkgscripts/pkg_get.sh php5-mysql-
Attempting to fetch/install package...
php5-core-5.2.3: complete
php5-mysql-5.2.3: complete
--- php5-core-5.2.3 -------------------
To finish the install, enable the php5 module with:
/usr/local/sbin/phpxs -s

To enable parsing of PHP scripts, add the following to
/var/www/conf/httpd.conf:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

Copy the config file below into /var/www/conf/php.ini
/usr/local/share/examples/php5/php.ini-recommended

Don't forget that the default OpenBSD httpd is chrooted
into /var/www by default, so you may need to create support
directories such as /var/www/tmp for PHP to work correctly.
--- php5-mysql-5.2.3 -------------------
Enable this module in php.ini using the following command:

/usr/local/sbin/phpxs -a mysql

Then you have to follow the post-install instructions:

-bash-3.2$ sudo /usr/local/sbin/phpxs -s
-bash-3.2$ sudo /usr/local/sbin/phpxs -a mysql

Edit /var/www/conf/httpd.conf and add the below line with the other AddTypes:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

I also recommend since we're going to be running PHP, adding index.php to the DirectoryIndex line:
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Save the httpd.conf file.

Now, copy the php.ini file over from the examples:

-bash-3.2-$ sudo cp \
/usr/local/share/examples/php5/php.ini-recommended \
/var/www/conf/php.ini

Now, make sure apache is set to start.
If you plan on keeping all your web-related content content in /var/www, find the httpd_flags line in /etc/rc.conf and change it to httpd_flags=""

If you intend on giving users traditional ~username (public_html) directories, start apache without being chrooted. Chroot is more secure, but it's a royal pain if you want user home-directories on a vanilla OAMP box, and beyond the "quick and dirty OAMP" scope of this article. Find the httpd_flags line in /etc/rc.conf and change it to httpd_flags="-u" to disable chroot if you must.

The above change to httpd_flags will make apache auto-start upon reboot. You can manually start it with apachectl, though:

-bash-3.2$ sudo apachectl start
/usr/sbin/apachectl start: httpd started

Make a phpinfo example php file and move it into the web root.

-bash-3.2$ echo "" > phpinfo.php
-bash-3.2$ sudo mv phpinfo.php /var/www/htdocs/

Then test it out by pointing a browser to your new phpinfo.php file (example: http://10.23.45.67/phpinfo.php ) and you should see output from PHP. If you see a blank screen or just the phpinfo line, something went wrong. Re-check your steps.


There you have it! As a test, I installed Joomla on this system (screen shot below). Joomla is a popular open-source CMS. I unpacked it into /var/www/htdocs/joomla and pointed my browser to it, following all of its instructions. This includes making a database, changing permissions on some of the Joomla files, and modifying some values in php.ini. The installation went off without any problems just like it would on any LAMP box. I'd imagine you'll see similar results with other *AMP packages such as phpMyAdmin, Xoops, and others.

December KC PHP User Group meeting

Usually, KCPUG's December meeting is either non-existent or of sparse attendance. The third Saturday of December is pretty close to the holidays, and many people have other plans. As such, I hadn't prepared anything to discuss, and neither had anyone else. I was pleasantly surprised when -- despite a snow storm -- we gathered more people than I'd expected. 2 of them came all the way out from Clinton, MO. It was nice to see some new faces among the regulars.

I demonstrated my Spreadsheet browser, and we all discussed some other projects we're working on. After that, it was mostly a discussion of various server platforms, web design software, and programming languages, both viable and not. This included Microsoft IIS, Apache, DreamWeaver, Front Page, PHP, ASP.NET, LOLCode, and BrainF---. Sometimes, a meeting without a lot of structure can be a great one.

Zend Framework and Google Spreadsheets

I've been tinkering with Zend Framework specifically for the purpose of dealing with Google Spreadsheets for the past couple of days. I know that most of my code is a complete bastardization of PHP. The examples I saw were using classes and objects. I'll be frank with you: I am not a developer, and I haven't taken the time to really wrap my brain around that stuff. The ZF Google Data tools return objects, and I worked my way through those enough to get the data out that I wanted, just in order to make this little project work.

I may build on this a little bit later, but for now I'd like to show you what I threw together, then how it works. Sorry, this is kind of big for a blog post so I put it in a scrolly iframe. Each little block of code has some documentation. It's worth reading my comments.



You can also download it here: Google Spreadsheets Explorer (php source, 4kB)

I don't actually have Zend Framework on any production servers right now, so I did a fresh install of PHP5 and Zend Framework on my OpenBSD virtual machine. If you want to test this yourself, you can easily get Zend Framework up and running easily if you have PHP 5.1.4 or newer running anywhere. Currently, PHP is up to 5.2.5.

When you first fire it up, there's no session, so it displays the login screen. You login with your google account information:

After logging in, a session is established. How this session information is stored varies from one PHP installation to the next. It might be in a client side cookie, a server side database, etc. Behind the scenes, the script is authenticating your stored session information to Google and creating the $client construct, which is what we'll use to bounce queries off of the mothership.

Once authenticated, its default action is to fetch a list of spreadsheets. This is an XML feed that Zend Framework essentially makes into an object. It contains one entry per spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are called by the key, which is a string unique to the creator of the spreadsheet, a period, then a string unique to the sheet itself. These are all properties of the "entry" within the feed object. I made a quick function that returns a basic array. Each element contains the URL to pull up the spreadsheet in my GS Explorer script, and the title of the spreadsheet. This gets displayed to the user.

function getsss($client) {
# Gets a list of spreadsheets; Returns an array.
 $spreadsheet = new Zend_Gdata_Spreadsheets($client);
 $feed = $spreadsheet->getSpreadsheetFeed();
 foreach ($feed->entry as $entry)
 {
     $id=split("/",$entry->id->text);
 $key=$id[5];
 $url="http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']."?key=$key";
 $availss[$url]=$entry->title->text;
 }
return($availss);
}

Clicking on one of the spreadsheets will give you a list of the sheets (or pages) within it. The code for getting the list of sheets is very similar to the code for getting the list of spreadsheets, so you can reference the source if you're interested.

I threw something together that just rips through the sheet and pulls the cell data out, dumping them in order, left to right, top to bottom. I could clean it up a bit, but this demonstrates reaping data out of Google Spreadsheets. Obviously, you could automate this to pull data down.

Unfortunately, the GData API, while slick, can be a bit sluggish. You probably wouldn't want to run a production site using live data from Google Spreadsheets. I'll cover writing to GS at a later time. That could come in handy, as you could use a web front-end or scheduled PHP script to occasionally update the values of a spreadsheet.