applications
WordPress – Sharing A Base Class Amongst Plugins
Introduction The new series of MoneyPress plugins that is coming out in the next month is going to be based on a common foundation. This allows us to maintain consistency, share new features across the product line, and provide an improved quality product that gets out to the consumer. However, during the migration to this new shared platform we uncovered some problem areas deep within the bowels of WordPress. Yes, even with the recently released 3.0 version. However we don't blame this on WordPress. Far from it. WordPress is a well engineered application, it's only fault is being tied into archaic versions of PHP... which means anything prior to PHP 5.3 when namespaces were finally introduced. There is a reason many languages have had namespaces for years, but that is a discussion for another post. One of the more nagging problems was ...
0 Comment | Posted in PHP,Programming Languages,System Administration,Wordpress,applications,blog
June 20, 2010
HTTP Errors When Uploading/Connecting in WordPress
Having problems browsing themes, uploading plug-ins, or doing just about anything that "talks" to the outside world via Wordpress? We have had a development server buried deep in our network behind several routers and firewalls that had a similar problem. Whenever we'd log into the dashboard we'd get various timeout error messages on each of the news sections. We'd not get our automatic update messages whenever there was a plugin update or a Wordpress update (3.0 is coming soon!). Well it turns out that we needed to fix 2 things to help speed up the network connection. Fix #1 - DNS Resolution We run this particular development box on Linux. That meant updating our /etc/resolv.conf file to talk directly to the DNS servers. If you use DHCP configuration or go through a router this file is often ...
0 Comment | Posted in Networking Utilities,PHP,System Administration,Wordpress,applications,blog
June 03, 2010
Upgrading Logwatch on CentOS 5
Introduction I finally got tired at looking at the thousand-plus line daily reports coming to my inbox from Logwatch every evening. Don't get me wrong, I love logwatch. It helps me keep an eye on my servers without having to scrutinize every log file. If you aren't using logwatch on your Linux boxes I strongly suggest you look into it and turn on this very valuable service. Most Linux distros come with this pre-installed. The problem is that on CentOS the version of logwatch that comes with the system was last updated in 2006. The logwatch project itself, however, was updated just a few months ago. As of this writing the version running on CentOS 5 is 7.3 (released 03/24/06) and the version on the logwatch SourceForge site is 7.3.6 (updated March 2010). In this latest version there are a log of nice updates to the scripts that ...
0 Comment | Posted in Networking Utilities,Security,System Administration,Tips & Tricks,applications,blog
May 31, 2010
Upgrading Redmine From 8.6 to 9.3
After more than a year of using Redmine to help us manage our projects it was time to upgrade. Redmine helps us manage our bug lists, wish lists, and to do lists. It helps us communicate with our clients effectively and efficiently using a web based media in a consistent format that is easy to use for both our developers and our clients. However, during the past year there have been several changes including the significant upgrades that came out in v9.x some months back. Our busy schedule kept us from upgrading as each new release came out, and sadly we had fallen far behind. This past weekend we decided it was time to upgrade. The notes below record some of the problems we ran into and outlines how we resolved them. If ...
0 Comment | Posted in Project Management,Redmine,Task Management,Web Apps,applications,blog
April 25, 2010
Setting Up Stunnel On Linux
Intro This article was written while getting SMTP authentication working with AT&T Business Class DSL services. The SMTP service requires authentication via a secure connection on port 465. Other articles will get into further details, this article's focus is on the stunnel part of the equation, which we use to wrap the standard sendmail/SMTP configuration. In This Article An example stunnel config file for talking to AT&T SMTP servers on port 465 (SMTPS) Testing the connection to AT&T SMTPS is working via telnet Getting stunnel running on system boot. Our Environment CentOS release 5.2 stunnel 4.15-2 We assume you have stunnel and telnet installed. If not, research the yum install commands for CentOS. You will also need superuser access to update the running services on your box. Setting up stunnel Stunnel will allow you to listen for data connections on a local port and redirect that traffic through an SSH wrapper to another system. In our case we are using ...
0 Comment | Posted in Networking Utilities,applications,blog
April 05, 2010
Scheduling Linux Apps
Executing Programs On A Schedule The Linux scheduling application is known as cron. Cron is your friend when you want a program to run at a specific time every day, or at multiple times during the day. The primary schedule is kept in a file known as crontab on most systems. A relatively normal location for this file is /etc/crontab. It is a text file that looks a bit odd, but is easily managed to create a variety of ways to get stuff to run when you want it to on a regular basis. A sample crontab file: SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/lib/news/bin MAILTO=root # # check scripts in cron.hourly, cron.daily, cron.weekly, and cron.monthly # -*/15 * * * * root test -x /usr/lib/cron/run-crons && /usr/lib/cron/run-crons >/dev/null 2>&1 */5 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.fivemin 59 * * * * root rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.hourly 10 2 * * * ...
0 Comment | Posted in System Administration,applications,blog
January 08, 2010
yum – Fixing Corrupt DB
If yum hangs you may have a corrupt DB. Try this. [root@localhost rpm]# cd /var/lib/rpm [root@localhost rpm]# rm -f __db* [root@localhost rpm]# rpm -rebuilddb [root@localhost rpm]# yum clean all Example is based on Redhat paths.
0 Comment | Posted in System Administration,applications,blog
March 15, 2009
