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Extract domain, path etc from a full url with PHP

2011-11-27T10:31:00.001-08:00

PHP's parse_url function makes it easy to extract the domain, path and other useful bits of information from a full URL. This can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as when spidering content from a website and needing to extract particular pieces of information from the links in the page.

Returning an associative array

The parse_url function takes the url as the first argument and an optional component value as the second argument. If the second argument is omitted then it returns the found values as an associative array.

This post is at http://www.electrictoolbox.com/php-extract-domain-from-full-url/ and getting the associative array of information from it is done like this:

$url = "http://www.electrictoolbox.com/php-extract-domain-from-full-url/";
$parts = parse_url($url);

Then doing print_r($parts) will output this:

Array
(
    [scheme] => http
    [host] => www.electrictoolbox.com
    [path] => /php-extract-domain-from-full-url/
)

If they are present, the array will also contain values for port, user, pass (i.e. password), query (the query string component of the URL) and fragment (the part after the #).

Returning a string

If all you are after is a single component from the array as a single string, pass the second "component" parameter from the following constants: PHP_URL_SCHEME, PHP_URL_HOST, PHP_URL_PORT, PHP_URL_USER, PHP_URL_PASS, PHP_URL_PATH, PHP_URL_QUERY or PHP_URL_FRAGMENT.

To just get the domain from this blog post's URL, do this:

$url = "http://www.electrictoolbox.com/php-extract-domain-from-full-url/";
$domain = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_HOST);

PHP Documentation

For more information read the PHP manual page for this function.

Follow up posts

Have a read of my post titled "PHP: get keywords from search engine referer url" to find out how to use the parse_url function in conjunction with the parse_str function to see what query string visitors have entered into a search engine.

http://www.electrictoolbox.com/php-extract-domain-from-full-url/

Find all anchor tags in a page with PHP and the Simple HTML DOM Parser

2011-11-26T23:36:00.001-08:00

This post shows how to download a web page and find all the link anchor tags in the page using PHP and the Simple HTML DOM Parser which has a jQuery like syntax selector.

PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

The PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser makes it easy to find particular elements within an HTML page in a similar way to jQuery. It can be downloaded from http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/ where there are also several examples.

Finding the <a> tags from a web page

First of all include the Simple HTML DOM Parser using either include, require, include_once or require_once:

require_once('/path/to/simple_html_dom.php');

And then load the webpage into the DOM using either the file_get_html() or str_get_html() helper functions. The filename passed to file_get_html() can either be the URL to the web page or the filename of a local file. str_get_html() takes a string instead of a filename.

$dom = file_get_html('http://www.google.com/');
$dom = str_get_html('... some html string ...');

Now do find() on the DOM for 'a' tags as in the following example which echos out the "href" property with a linebreak between each one:

foreach($dom->find('a') as $a) {
    if($a->href) {
        echo $a->href . "\n";
    }
}

Using www.google.com as an example the above would output this:

http://images.google.co.nz/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi
http://maps.google.co.nz/maps?hl=en&tab=wl
http://news.google.co.nz/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn
http://groups.google.co.nz/grphp?hl=en&tab=wg
http://books.google.co.nz/bkshp?hl=en&tab=wp
http://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&tab=wm
http://www.google.co.nz/intl/en/options/
http://scholar.google.co.nz/schhp?hl=en&tab=ws
http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/?hl=en&tab=wb
http://translate.google.co.nz/?hl=en&tab=wT
http://www.youtube.com/?hl=en&tab=w1&gl=NZ
http://www.google.com/calendar/render?hl=en&tab=wc
http://docs.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wo
http://www.google.co.nz/reader/view/?hl=en&tab=wy
http://sites.google.com/?hl=en&tab=w3
http://www.google.co.nz/intl/en/options/
/url?sa=p&pref=ig&pval=3&q=http://www.google.co.nz/ig%3Fhl%3Den%26source%3Diglk&usg=AFQjCNGi5EQv2pmx9Kd5MdCX46heegpxAw
/preferences?hl=en
https://www.google.com/accounts/Login?hl=en&continue=http://www.google.co.nz/
/advanced_search?hl=en
/language_tools?hl=en
http://www.google.co.nz/setprefs?sig=0_Va9MAZW7LCKUpGRFXj4-Xh78Tkc=&hl=mi
/intl/en/ads/
/services/
/intl/en/about.html
http://www.google.com/ncr
/intl/en/privacy.html

Notice that these are the hrefs as they appear in the HTML source, so some are relative to the current document/domain and some are absolute containing a full http:// path.

Resolving the paths

I've posted how to resolve the paths to full http:// URLs using the url_to_absolute library from Nadeau Software Consulting in my earlier post titled "Extract images from a web page with PHP and the Simple HTML DOM Parser"

I will write a standalone post about how to do this later this week, which also deals with a slight issue with the URLs returned as they are partially encoded by default using rawurlencode() which is not really ideal. This later post shows the modification needed to resolve this along with some additional examples.

http://www.electrictoolbox.com/find-anchor-tags-php-simple-html-dom-parser/

special characters in filename cause image to not get created

2011-11-26T06:57:00.000-08:00

Drupal ImageCache:

special characters in filename cause image to not get created

Solved:

$imagecache_path = str_replace(' ', '%20', $imagecache_path);

That mean you remove special character like #,& in URL.

Good luck to you

http://drupal.org/node/129433

ClamAV on CentOS 5.5

2011-11-21T23:28:00.001-08:00

I know this is Linux and viruses are not supposed to be an issue, but face it we have other operating systems connecting and they are known for bringing these little monsters in, so it is our duty to seek and destroy those on the server. In steps ClamAV, a fast, free and efficient anti-virus solution. Dag Wieers maintains many packages for downloads and he just happens to have what we are looking for with ClamAV. Once you have this installed there are many other applications to integrate with on your server.

To install
1. Download the file using wget
$ sudo wget http://packages.sw.be/clamav/clamav-0.96.4-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
$ sudo wget http://packages.sw.be/clamav/clamav-db-0.96.4-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Install it
$ sudo rpm -ivh clamav-0.96*.rpm

Now that we have it installed there are a few things we need to learn about it and do. First thing is to update the definitions. We achieve this by running the command freshclam. Freshclam requires and Internet connection to download and update the virus definitions. All you have to do is type the command, press enter and voila! We are up to date.

2. To run antivirus and print infected files
clamscan -ri /home
3. To remove infected files and emails.
clamscan -ri --remove /home
4. Running as Cron Daily Job
To run antivirus as a cron job (automatically scan daily) just run crontab -e from your command line. Then add the following line and save the file. I have added them to my root crontab for this example.
02 1 * * * root clamscan -R /var/www
This will run the cron job daily @ 1.02 AM by scanning the public html files. You can change the folder to whatever you want for mail etc.
00 11 * * * * root freshclam
This will update the anti-virus database at 11 am daily.

CentOS change hostname without reboot

2011-11-17T20:43:00.001-08:00

Step 1:
You may also need to add/change the hostname in the /etc/hosts file. By default this would look something like this, using our www.example.com example again:

127.0.0.1 www.example.com localhost localhost.localdomain

Step 2:
The file /etc/sysconfig/network contains the hostname and will look something like this:

NETWORKING="yes"
GATEWAY="10.1.1.1"
HOSTNAME="www.example.com"

Step 3:
This change won't take affect until the next reboot, but you can make the change happen immediately using the hostname command like so:

$ hostname ftp.example.com

Step 4:

service syslog restart

http://shebangme.blogspot.com/2010/10/centos-change-hostname-without-reboot.html

Drupal: Get vocabulary id by term id

2011-11-16T18:59:00.000-08:00

In Drupal 6, if you know the taxonomy term ID, you can get the vocabulary ID by using the following code:

$term = taxonomy_get_term($tid);
$vid = $term->vid;

If you have a node ID, then you can use the following code to get the vocabulary ID of all the taxonomy terms associated with the node using the following code:

$node = node_load($nid);
$vids = array();

if (!empty($node->taxonomy) {
  foreach ($node->taxonomy as $tid => $term) {
    $vids[] = $term->vid;
  }
}

In Drupal 7, the code would be the following:

$term = taxonomy_term_load($tid);
$vid = $term->vid;

In Drupal 7, the node property $node->taxonomy doesn't exist anymore. Instead, there is$node->field_<vocabulary_name>, which is an array with two different structures.

tags
other taxonomy terms

http://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/6456/get-vocabulary-id-by-term-or-node

Drupal: How to get term name by term id

2011-11-16T06:47:00.001-08:00

You can use this in your themes to add additional information on your taxonomy/term/x pages ;

<?phpfunction get_tax_from_arg ($vid) {

    if (arg(0) == 'taxonomy' && arg(1) == 'term') {

    $tid = (int)arg(2);

    if(is_numeric(arg(2))) {

        $term = taxonomy_get_term($tid);

        if(is_object($term)) {

            if($vid == $term->vid) {

            $name = $term->name;

            return $name;

            }

            else return;

        }

        else return;

    }

    }

}// use like this -  print get_tax_from_arg(1), where 1 is vocabulary id?>

http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules--taxonomy--taxonomy.module/function/taxonomy_get_term/6

How to install soap php with version

2011-11-15T18:37:00.001-08:00

By default when you using command "yum install php-soap", this will install the latest version so you have to install latest dependencies, if do not want to do this, so you want install exact version by following command
#yum install php-soap-5.2.17

PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

2011-11-15T00:54:00.001-08:00

If you want to develop advanced Google like apps that crawl and parse the HTML content using PHP one valuable resource is PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser.
PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser underlying the E-media built in crawler and I use it in the EC_1 app. Also, I use it on the latest E-media Newsletter app.

What is PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

If you take a look into the simple_html_dom.php file you will find about 1000 lines of PHP code. The base code is formed by the simple_html_dom class. So, the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser is a PHP class that you can use to parse the HTML content. In other words, you can analyze the HTML code of a webpage and take the anchors, divs, spans, tables cells or you can get elements atributs such as id, class, etc.

Initiate PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

First of all, you must include the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser into your page. You can do this by using a simple PHP include construct:

include '<path_to_file>/simple_html_dom.php';

In the above code you must replace the <path_to_file> with the path to the simple_html_dom.php relative to you PHP script. Then you must specify the HTML source code either by a string or a file path. So, you must choose between:

$html = str_get_html('<html><body>Hello!</body></html>');

$html = file_get_html('html_source.html');

$html = file_get_html('http://www.liviubalan.com/html_source.html');

As you can see you can specify both relative or absolute file paths.

Selecting HTML elements and attributes

After you initiate the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser it's time to actually search for specific elements using nothing else than CSS selectors:

// find all <div> elements which attribute id="foo"
$ret = $html->find('div[id="foo"]');

// find all anchors, returns an array of element objects
$ret = $html->find('a');

// find (N)th anchor, returns element object or null if not found (zero based)
$ret = $html->find('a', 0);

// find all <div> elements with the id attribute
$ret = $html->find('div[id]');

// find all elements that has attribute id
$ret = $html->find('[id]');

Tips and tricks

If you take a look into the simplehtmldom.php file you can see the usage of the PHP Simple HTML DOM. See the print_v and echo_pre functions written by me. The PHP find method usually returns an array. So, the print_v function is very useful to display this array content. If you will use a PHP var_dump or print_r function to display this array content you will see a lot of properties, leading to big loading time. So, use print_v instead and if you need to you can modify it. Also, use echo_pre function to see the content of a string, including HTML special chars and spaces.
If you use this class inside a loop especially on big HTML files be very careful on the freeing the memory. For this, the PHP Simple HTML DOM provides the clear method:

$html->clear();

This is an empirical observation from when I worked to the EC_1 project where even I increase the memory usage on the server or I unset the $html variable the lack of memory appeared.
Another technique that I use I call it safe mode chaining: every time you use Simple HTML DOM chaining be very careful if the previous selected element exists:

$ret = $html->find('span',0);
if ( isset($ret) ) {
    $ret = $html->find('b',0);
    echo_pre($ret);
}

More about PHP Simple HTML DOM you can find on http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/. You can also try the PHP Simple HTML DOM examples at http://dev.liviubalan.com/_res/php/simplehtmldom/example/.
http://www.liviubalan.com/content/php-simple-html-dom-parser

PHP: Create comma separated list from array

2011-11-08T19:21:00.001-08:00

Use the implode() command to create a comma separated list from an array.

code snippet:

<?php //create a comma separated list from an array $array = array('green','purple','blue','yellow','amber','red'); $comma_separated = implode(",", $array); 
echo $comma_separated; ?>

sample output:

green,purple,blue,yellow,amber,red

PHP: extract filename from a full path string

2011-11-08T18:58:00.001-08:00

Easily return the filename component of a path with the built-in PHP basename() function. Useful for splitting a string path to get the filename.

code snippet:

<?php 
$path = "/home/httpd/html/index.php"; $file = basename($path);        // $file is set to "index.php" $file = basename($path, ".php"); // $file is set to "index" ?>

notes:

this example from the php.net documentation

http://snippetdb.com/php/filname-from-path

How to check if string contains substring PHP

2011-11-08T18:57:00.001-08:00

Often, we see two approaches for this. One option is to use the strpos PHP function. The following example shows how this is used:

<?php
$pos = strpos($haystack,$needle);

if($pos === false) {
// string needle NOT found in haystack
}
else {
// string needle found in haystack
}
?>

http://www.maxi-pedia.com/string+contains+substring+PHP

Check hard disk space

2011-11-06T19:22:00.001-08:00

df -h |grep /dev/sda3 | awk '{print $5}' |awk -F"%" '{print $1}'

How do I enable Google Gmail 2-step password verification?

2011-10-31T04:16:00.000-07:00

I hear that there's a new security system you can enable on Google Gmail and the rest of the Google suite that requires you to have your smart phone along with your password? What's the security system called [ed note: "2-step verification"] and how can I use it for my own account?

Dave's Answer: You're talking about something that I am pretty excited about, actually. One of the classic problems with password security is that the security is only as good as the password remains secret. If someone has your password, not only can they get into your account but they can then change the password and shut you out.
There are challenge systems where you have a separate device used for security: to log in, the system prompts you with a sequence of digits and you then enter that into the device which transforms it uniquely. You then use the resultant value to prove that you're you (or, more accurately, that you have the device in hand).
A password is known as a "what you know" challenge, while an authentication device is a "what you have" challenge. Each has its weaknesses, but combine the two and you have a pretty decent security system, one where even if someone steals your password they can't get in without also having your device.
Problem is who is going to carry a separate device?
Enter the smart phone...
As you have heard, Google's enabled a 2-step verification system that makes every Google property - including Gmail - tons more secure and ideal for if you're on the road. It combines your existing password with an app on your smartphone that generates one-time verification codes: if you enable it you'll need to both to log in each and every time thereafter.
I think it's awesome and enabled it the first minute I could. I think you should too.
The down side? The 2-step verification system is pretty darn complicated to get set up! It'll take us at least twenty screen captures even to illustrate it and Google suggests you allocate 15-20 minutes to complete the setup.
To get started -- and you should! -- you need to jump to Google Account Management once you've logged in to the system. Now under personal security options you'll see:
Click on the 2-step verification link. If you're unlucky, you'll see this:
Hopefully, however, you don't have to wait and it's ready for you, in which case you'll see this instead:
Ready? Have the time to do this? You can't stop halfway...
Click on "Set up 2-step verification"...
Now you'll find that you can only do this if you have a smartphone. I have an iPhone so that's what I'll choose:
After selecting my phone, I click on "next" and learn that the next step involves me picking up my phone and installing an app:
On the iPhone I jump to the App Store and search for "Google Authenticator":
Ah, there it is. And it even has decent star ratings. Regardless, time to download it, which can easily be done by tapping on the green "FREE" button.
Once it does you'll need to start the application. The opening screen looks like this:
Tap on the "+" and the next screen on your iPhone (or other smart phone) prompts you to enter your account information:
But wait, it's cooler than that! Back on your computer, click on the "next" button and you'll find a QR Code shows up on your screen:
Now, back to the smartphone app. Tap on "Scan Barcode" and it's a QR Code reader! All you have to do is point it at the QR Code on your screen:
Seconds later it scans and reads your account information and you get your first verification code:
Here's where it gets interesting. Just stare at the app for a minute or two: the codes are based on both the current time and your account information, so if you wait long enough, you'll see that it changes. In fact, the tiny little circle on the top left is a timer: every time it goes a full revolution the code changes. Neat, eh?
Okay, focus. Back to the Web and to setting this up! Click on "next" and you'll have a chance to test the new verification code:
I enter my current code and click Verify and...
Check that out. It's working!
Click on "next" to proceed...
Ah, great, they really have thought this through, because it is quite possible to end up needing to log in to your Google / Gmail account but not have your smartphone and therefore not be able to enter the time-based verification code. What's their solution? Click on "next" to find out!
That makes sense. I printed two copies and have one stashed in my wallet while the other is in my office. I imagine that there's a way to get new one-time codes if/when these are used up, but that's the subject of a different blog post. Let's stay focused here! Jeez, you're so easily sidetracked. :-)
Where were we? Oh yeah, so we printed out the temp passwords. Now there's another emergency backup choice:
I opted for an automated voice message to a backup phone number of my own. If you're in a relationship it might be your partner's mobile device (or your kids phone, or your parents, etc etc).
Click "next"...
Interesting, but so far I haven't been able to figure out what that means. Since I don't actually use Picassa, it might not be a big deal anyway. For now, I've been alerted that there's going to be something different about how I log in to those services (and I presume that over time they'll be fixing that so that all Google apps have support for the 2-step verification process).
Click "next" yet again and we're almost done!
Sheesh. I told you it's a complicated process, right? Everything look good? Click the big blue button!!
No, really, you do want to do this, right?
Done!
Really, done.
So what's it look like when you use the Google 2-step verification system? Here's what it looked like when I went to log in to Gmail again:
So far, pretty normal. But when I click on "Sign In", it now prompts me for the latest numeric code on my Google Authentication app:
When I enter that correctly and click on "Verify", I'm in, with a security system now based on what I know (a password) and what I have (my smartphone with the Google Authenticate app).
Incredibly cool. Now, how long until other sites start offering the same increased security? And, for that matter, how long until you turn it on for your Google account?
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/enable_turn_on_google_gmail_2-step_password_verification.html

100+ Drupal Views tutorials and resources

2011-10-28T05:40:00.001-07:00

http://www.drupalove.com/article/100-drupal-views-tutorials-and-resources

Drupal: How To Programmatically Add, Embed Or Insert Views In Your Theme tpl

2011-10-28T05:16:00.000-07:00

The Views module is one of the best things to have happened to Drupal. Views provides an easy way for any Drupal site designers topresent how lists and tables of content. Views has a smart query builder that can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. In this article we will tell you how to programmatically add, embed or insert Views in your theme's tpl.

You can easily embed your pre-configured views in your theme's TPL using this command:

views_embed_view($name, $display_id = 'default')

This function is meant to be called from PHP snippets to embed a view in a Drupal node. It has two parameters: $name - The name of the view to embed and $display_id- The display id to embed. Consider this example below. We are embedding a view for displaying related articles after the article content type. For this we embed a view called Relatedarticles in our theme's node-article.tpl.php file.

The code snippet below shows the scenario as explained above:

Drupal: Embed Views in your Theme

The snippet above shows a variable $display_id which is set to block_2. Theillustration below shows how to find out the value for $display_id corresponding to the Display of the view that you want to embed in your website, progammatically.

Configure your views according to the Display IDs

The screenshot below shows the output of the view that has been embedded in the code snippet shown above, taken from oyestyle.com

Output of the programmatically embedded views

The function views_embed_view won't display the title of the view. In order to get the title of the view, you can use the following code snippet:

$view = views_get_view($view_name);
print $view->get_title();

Should you require further help with the above "Programmatic View Embedding" or any other Drupal related problems then you can send us a mail with your query to:mailman@digitizor.com

http://digitizor.com/2010/12/02/drupal-programmatically-add-embed-views-theme-tpl/
http://joshnotes.com/note/how-programmatically-insert-view-drupal-node-33.html

http://snipplr.com/view/51638/
http://www.unleashed-technologies.com/blog/2010/04/29/programmatically-output-views-block-drupal-6

How to insert a block programmatically with Drupal

2011-10-28T01:48:00.001-07:00

Block is generated by a view

$block = module_invoke('views', 'block', 'view', <view_name not quoted: this is The unique identifier of the view>);

example:

$block = module_invoke('views', 'block', 'view', list_all_providers_cat_map);
print $block['content'];

The above does work for Drupal 5 but it doesn;t look like is working for Drupal 6 so you can just embed the view.

print views_embed_view('most_read_today', 'block_1');

If you need the title then use

$view = views_get_view('most_read_today');
$view->set_display('block_1');
$output = $view->preview();
$title = $view->get_title();
print '<div class="title">' . $title . '</div>';
print $output;

User created block

$block = module_invoke('block', 'block', 'view', <block id>);

example:

$block = module_invoke('block', 'block', 'view', 20);
print $block['content'];

Block is generated by a module

$block = module_invoke(<module name>, 'block', 'view', <block id>);

example

$block = module_invoke('google_admanager', 'block', 'view', 0);
print $block['content'];

NOTE: How to find the block ID.
Go to the list of blocks ( /admin/build/block ) and hover the mouse over the configure link. For a user created block you'll see /admin/build/bloc/configure/block/<id> and for a module created block you'll see /admin/build/bloc/configure/<module name>/<id>
Please notice that it is the same syntax so to speak because in the case of the user created block the module name is block since it is the block module that creates it.

http://valerio.della-porta.com/node/20

20 Drupal Modules to Boost Your Website’s Functionality

2011-10-19T01:58:00.000-07:00

Drupal is a robust content management system that can do nearly anything you throw at it. Hundreds of Drupal modules–add-ons that extend the functionality of Drupal core–exist to help you create a powerful website.

This is a roundup of some excellent Drupal modules covering the following areas:

Managing and displaying content
User engagement and game mechanics
User registration

Managing and Displaying Content

1. Menu Block

In many pre-built Drupal themes, the primary navigation bar (typically displayed across the top of the page) shows only top-level links. Drop-down, multi-level navigation is not automatically enabled in many themes. You can use Nice Menus to turn on fly-out and drop-down navigation, but you’ll still have to edit your theme files.

However, with the Menu Block Drupal module, you can easily add a new block that pulls all relevant navigation links together, and then you can place that new block anywhere on the page–in the content section, for example, or perhaps in the left or right sidebar.

Here’s a menu block set-up page that pulls links from the equivalent navigation menu and displays it as specified:

Here is the menu block in action, displaying the children of a particular page in the sidebar:

2. Node Reference URL Widget

Node Reference URL Widget (requires the nodereference and content module in CCK) is a useful Drupal module that lets you refer to one piece of content from another.

Let’s say, for example, that your website has a lot of nodes in a content type called "People"; Jane Doe, John Smith and Maria Miller are nodes in this content type. You realize that you need to assign each person to a category to better organize the page, such as:

Staff: Jane Doe
Board: John Smith, Maria Miller
Volunteers: John Smith, Maria Miller

Using nodereference, you can assign each person to a parent category by creating a new CCK field. For example, you could assign a new person directly from the "People" category listing. In this scenario, on the details page for "Staff," you would click on "Add a new person" and they would automatically be categorized as a staff member.

Here’s an example of a node reference link to "Add an update about this event" at the bottom of an "Event details" page:

And here’s what the new data entry field looks like for that particular update:

3. Views Attach

In the example above, creating the "Staff" category also created the "Staff" page. You can use the Views Attach Drupal module (it requires the Views module) to create a content view related to that category. Here is a video showing you the power of CCK, Views, Node Reference URL Widget (above), and Views Attach used together.

Some ideas:

You could create a view of all people who are categorized as "Staff" and a grid of staff headshot photos to display on that page.
You could create a view of all documents that have been assigned to the Staff category, and then display the view of all documents (such as human resources documents, PDFs, etc.) directly on the Staff page.
You could create a "Restaurant Details" page, then use the Node Reference URL widget to add a link to "Add a review to this restaurant," then use Views Attach to create a list of all member-submitted reviews directly under the restaurant’s details.

The following example shows the Views Attach module in action:

In the example above, we have a content type called "Series." Every series page has a built-in view that pulls in all of the content types marked as belonging to that series. This view can be themed or edited as desired; it can be displayed as a grid, list, table or slideshow.

4. Automatic Nodetitles

Sometimes you want to generate content automatically. Automatic Nodetitles generates titles for your content based on various criteria, including the date of creation, the user name responsible for the content, or the "parent" of a particular node.

For example, I personally have a "Product" content type. I want every new product image that falls under the "Product" content type to be automatically named with the parent product title. You can specify a token to generate the desired title of your node.

In such a case, whenever content is created, a node title will also be automatically created.

Here are the four new nodes and their automatically generated titles:

5. Nodewords

For search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, you might need to add certain keywords to certain nodes (e.g. "pages", "announcements", "posts", etc.) on your website. The Nodewords module lets you specify keywords or key phrases on a node-by-node basis (instead of a website-wide, cascading basis). You can then track results with Google Analytics or Drupal core’s statistics-tracking feature.

6. ImageCache

The Image Drupal module defines sizes that you can adjust for any image uploaded by a user. The ImageCache module extends this functionality and lets you set up "presets" for image processing that include cropping, desaturating color, resizing images to exact sizes, rotating, resizing by aspect ratio, scaling and sharpening.

Note: This module has been moved into Drupal 7 core, but is still useful to Drupal 6 (and below) users.

7. Views Slideshow

Most websites need some way to fit multiple pieces of information into a fixed space. This can be done by creating a "View" of particular data on your website. The Views Slideshow Drupal module can help make this view more interesting.

For example, you could create a view of the most recent articles, and then use the module to cycle through that view. You could set up a "Recent highlights" section showing the articles’ titles, images and teasers. You could set up a "Top-rated products" list that shows images, "Add to cart" links, titles and descriptions.

In the example below, we’ve created a slideshow of articles with a fade-in effect on the large photo and thumbnails across the bottom. The user clicks on a thumbnail to get to each article.

In this next example, we’ve created a slideshow that fades in a variety of image details of certain products.

8. Nodequeue

If you want to highlight certain items in a section, like an "Editor’s pick" section, and you want the website administrator to control what appears in that section, then the Nodequeue module will prove useful to you. The node queue can be set up to display according to your specifications.

In this case, I’m allowing 15 articles in the queue at any given time:

To add an item to the queue, a user with adequate permissions simply clicks "Add to highlighted" at the bottom of the node.

9. String Overrides

If you need to change the default language of parts of your website, you could hack the Drupal core code–strongly not recommended, just don’t do it–or you could use the handy String Overrides Drupal module to find a string and then override the matched text. This module lets you control a specific phrase anywhere on your website.

For example, on one of my websites, I needed to change the default check-out message because it didn’t suit the organization. I used String Overrides to make this task simpler.

User Engagement and Game Mechanics

10. Better Formats

Drupal comes with basic support for input filters, which allow administrators to specify what kind of HTML can be added by users. For example, an administrator might want to strip all formatting for novice users but allow links, bold text, italicized text and tables for advanced users. When a user creates content for a Drupal website, they have to specify which "input filter" they want to run their content through prior to publication–this can be an inconvenience, and can open the CMS to content-rendering issues because of an incorrectly chosen input filter.

However, with the Better Formats Drupal module, you can extend support for the default input filter that is assigned to a logged-in user.

For example, perhaps only the content provided by an administrator would be set to the "Full HTML" filter. This would save users from having to specify which filter to use, especially if they are eligible for many different ones.

11. Flag

A website with user-submitted content must be monitored for spam and for submissions that are against submission guidelines. Use the Flag Drupal module to allow users to flag (or bookmark) content that they want to return to.

You can use this module for features such as "Add to bookmarks," "Mark as inappropriate," "Flag as helpful" or "Add to wishlist."

You could probably think of other reasons to flag content.

12. Organic Groups

Organic Groups (OG) is an amazing resource for building mini-communities centered on specific causes or issues. OG lets your users self-organize by maintaining public and private groups and posting messages directly to their groups.

It’s an excellent way to encourage users to own their presence on your website. Each group can have subscribers and a landing page where the subscribers communicate between themselves.

13. Private Messages

The Private Messages Drupal module gives users their own inboxes on your website and the ability to communicate with one another.

It’s used in conjunction with many other modules, such as the Advanced Profile Kitmodule, with which users get their own dashboards, and users with appropriate permissions can send private messages.

Private Messages can also be used in conjunction with the Advanced Forum module, in which users with appropriate permissions can send private messages to those who post in forums.

14. User Points

Social news and user-generated content sites such as Reddit, Hacker News, andStack Overflow use a gaming mechanic often referred to as "karma" to encourage users to participate by being able to earn points for certain tasks (such as submitting good content or leaving a thoughtful comment that gets upvoted by other members).

You can set up a similar feature in your Drupal-powered website that assigns points to user-generated content. You could award points to users who complete their profiles, upload images, post comments or add events to the calendar.

Another novel way to integrate points into your website is to let users trade points for store merchandise and other perks. I’ve also seen users treat points as a kind of in-site currency; points are exchanged on the website, and real money is exchanged for points (for example, a user could purchase a product worth 250 points to quickly increase their total).

15. User Badges

Consider using User Points in tandem with User Badges–a Drupal module that allows users to unlock badges based on how many points they redeem. Alternatively, user badges could be awarded based on their participation or for doing certain tasks, which can then be measured with titles like "Sheriff," "Mayor," "Diamond user" and "Moderator," similar to social sites such as Foursquare.

16. Invite

Invite is a standard invite-by-email module that allows users with appropriate permissions to send invitations to their friends via email messages generated by your website, similar to invite-only community sites such as Dribbble and Forrst.

Invitations can be tracked and constrained (i.e. limiting the number of invitations available to each user). You can grow your website organically by challenging users to send invitations to their real-life contacts.

Invitation settings can be done by the administrator, as shown below:

17. GMap

Google Maps can integrate well with website content. Perhaps you’d like to add a "location" to a certain node (say an event, product or blog post). Use the GMap module to assign and display a map for certain content or users on your website. To use this module, you must sign up for a Google Maps API Key for your website.

18. Ubercart

Ubercart–a free open source e-commerce solution –is the most widely used e-commerce module for Drupal. Out-of-the-box users with adequate permissions, for example, can add products and allow authenticated users to purchase those products with check-out functionality. Enable a payment gateway such as Authorize, Google Checkout or PayPal to accept payments, and you’re ready to start selling your goods on the Web.

Ubercart features include shipping-quote integration with UPS/USPS, discount coupons by percentage or fixed amount, stock inventory control and many pre-built reports to track orders and customers.

There are plenty of configuration options and documentation in the official Ubercartsite, if you would like to learn more.

User Registration

19. Login Toboggan

In Drupal, a website can have both public users (anonymous) and authenticated users (registered and signed into the system). During the authentication process, you can assign statuses to users; for example, you could offer memberships for a fee, or make day passes available with which users can get bumped up to a status that has more access permissions.

The Login Toboggan Drupal module helps you exclude pre-authenticated users–those who have registered but not yet confirmed their email addresses–from common functions and tasks that authenticated users are permitted to do.

For example, I use Login Toboggan to assign a "pre-authenticated" status to a new user. At this stage, the user can review website data but cannot post reviews, give star ratings or add comments until they verify their email address. Once the user confirms their email address, Login Toboggan assigns an "authenticated" status, and the user is granted all of the abilities of authenticated users.

20. Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect is a nifty Drupal module that allows you to streamline the user registration process by letting users register and sign in with their Facebook accounts using Facebook’s authentication API.

If your website’s users are already on Facebook, consider opening up access to your website by allowing them to log in with their Facebook username and password, making it more convenient for them, as well as for you, so that you don’t have to store any user account data (such as passwords and email). This module requires you to sign up your site on Facebook.

To extend your Drupal-Facebook integration, try the DrupalforFacebook module. It integrates Facebook Connect, "Like" buttons, stream publishing and extended permissions for sharing information between a user’s Facebook and Drupal website profiles.

Conclusion

As you probably know, this is but a small sampling of the available modules in Drupal. As always, before working with new modules, back up your database, and save a copy of your website prior to making changes. To evaluate a module, go to its project page (which are all linked above) and review the bug list, the documentation, live versions of the module and the number of downloads (to see how popular it is).

Single Sign-on across Sub-Domains in Drupal with No Extra Modules

2011-10-19T01:57:00.001-07:00

With the multitude of single sign-on modules out there for Drupal, it's easy to miss the fact that Drupal has a built-in single sign on mechanism already. No modules, no configuration, just 20 easy lines of PHP in your site's settings.php file. This solution works for a lot of clients, but the set of requirements is pretty specific as to when you can use this approach. This includes:

The sites sharing a single log-in must be on the same domain. For example:

www.example.com
forums.example.com
subsite.example.com

You must be using MySQL.
Your sites must be on the same hardware cluster to be able to query each other's databases.

If your site fits within those requirements, you're on your way to simple, efficient, and easy Single Sign-on!

The concept for this single sign-on approach is based around Drupal's ability to prefix database tables. As you may know, you can run multiple Drupal sites on the same MySQL database. However, most sites are not configured this way, each site is given it's own dedicated database. Drupal's table prefixing can be combined with MySQL's ability to query across databases to make a simple "shared table" across multiple sites. Then you just need to set a cookie domain so that the two sites share session information and you're done!

If that sounds a little heady, let's just look at the code. Open the settings.php file (usually located in sites/default/settings.php) for your two sites. These sites can be in entirely different Drupal installs, or they can be under the same Drupal installation if you're using multisite capabilities.

Master Site Configuration

In your "Master" site (the one that the user information will be stored in), you don't need to make hardly any changes. There should be a line similar to this in your settings.php file:

$db_url = 'mysql://user:pass@localhost/master_database';

$db_prefix = '';

You don't need to change this at all. The master site stores all the user names, passwords, and sessions. However there is another line further down in settings.php that let's you specify a cookie domain. This needs to be un-commented (remove the leading # sign) and set to the name of your domain.Make sure you include the leading period before the domain.

$cookie_domain = '.example.com';

Slave Site Configuration

The slave site will connect to the Master site's database for certain tables, specifically the ones that include user information. This makes it so that user's simply "log in" using the information from the master site's database.

Here's where we use MySQL's database name prefixing, where all queries to the "slave" database are simply prefixed with the name of the slave database. Same goes for the master.

$db_url = 'mysql://user:pass@localhost/slave_database';

$db_prefix = array(

   'default'   => 'name_of_slave_database.',

   'users'     => 'name_of_master_database.',

   'sessions'  => 'name_of_master_database.',

   'role'      => 'name_of_master_database.',

   'authmap'   => 'name_of_master_database.',

);

Then we configure the site to use the same "shared" cookie domain as the master.

$cookie_domain = '.example.com';

The method for a user logging in does not change, the user can just use the exact same user name and password on both sites, logging into one will immediately log you into all of them. Users can even change their passwords and have it work across sites, and you can still use Views to build listings of users without any changes at all. Hurray for shared cookies.

Taking it further

Just by adding a few lines of code to your settings.php file on your different sites can make shared login a piece of cake. Note that this makes it so that other user-related information may need to also be shared. Specifically if you're using Profile module, you may also want to share the "profile_fields" and the "profile_values" tables.

One caveat you might encounter is that your user picture URLs are all relative to the Master site's files directory. To solve this problem, you can create a symlink from "files/pictures" on your slave sites to point to the master site's "files/pictures" directory.

ln -s /usr/home/example.com/sites/default/files/pictures /usr/home/subsite.example.com/sites/default/files/pictures

Again, this approach will only work across subdomains of the same domain and if the sites are hosted on the same set of servers. The security built into browsers prevents domains from reading the cookies of completely different domains, which is when you'll need to look into other solutions such as OpenID Provider, Single Sign-on, or Bakery.

This article was sponsored by our friends at Dooce! You can see this in action between their shared sites:

http://www.lullabot.com/articles/drupal-single-sign-across-sub-domains

How to install torrentflux on centos 5.5

2011-10-06T00:52:00.000-07:00

What is TorrentFlux ?

TorrentFlux is a web-based system for managing bit torrent file transfers. It is an open source package (GPL) and developed for Linux, Unix & BSD platforms on the ubiquitous LAMP stack.

How to Install it :

Step 1 : Update Centos.

Code:

yum update

Step 2 : Install Modules

Code:

yum install httpd python php mysql-server php-mysql php-common php-gd php-curl

Step 3 : Restart Apache

Code:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Step 4 : Make MYSQL

Code:

mysql_install_db

Step 5 : Fix some permissons :

Code:

chkconfig --levels 235 httpd on

Code:

chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on

Step 6 : Restart Mysql

Code:

/etc/init.d/mysqld restart

Step 7 : Make a MYSQL DataBase :

Code:

mysqladmin -u root password YOUR ROOT PASSWORD

Step 8 : Setup Some Folders for TorrentFlux

Code:

mkdir /var/www/html/torrentflux

  

cd /var/www/html/torrentflux/

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/tor...3&big_mirror=0

Step 9 : Un-Tar Torrent Flux

Code:

tar -xzf torrentflux_2.4.tar.gz

mv torrentflux_2.4/html/* /var/www/html/torrentflux/

Step 10 : Make a database Again

Code:

cd /var/www/html/torrentflux/torrentflux_2.4/sql/

mysql -u root -p 

Code:
mysql>create database Your DATABASE NAME;

mysql>\q

.... Follow On Screen Steps

Step 11 : Enter This Code

Code:

mysql torrentflux < mysql_torrentflux.sql -u root -p

Step 12 : Make Downloads Folder

Code:

mkdir /mydownloads (can put anything u need) 
chmod 777 /mydownloads
chown apache.apache /mydownloads

Step 13 : Edit Your Config

Code:

nano /var/www/html/torrentflux/config.php

$cfg["db_pass"] = "YOUR PASS";    // password for database

Step 14 : Restart MYSQL and Apache

Code:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart 
/etc/init.d/mysqld restart

Now You can Login. http://youripadresss/torrentflux

Code:

user:goombah pass:iamah

Supermicro IPMIview Review – Remote Server Monitoring and Management and KVM-over-IP

2011-10-04T04:27:00.000-07:00

The ability to remotely monitor servers utilizing IPMI 2.0 is a key differentiator between server grade hardware and consumer hardware. Supermicro’s IPMIview software is an often overlooked piece of software that makes managing multiple servers remotely a simple task. While there is a simple web interface that Supermicro uses on many of its boards, the IPMI 2.0 features, including KVM-over-IP can also be accessed through a utility that Supermicro provides. For those users with multiple systems, IPMIview allows for up to twenty machines to be managed and monitored at a time from a remote PC. Best of all, with the KVM-over-IP features, remote temperature and fan speed monitoring, and the ability to remotely power cycle machines, a user can put a system into service never attaching an optical drive, keyboard, mouse or monitor to the machine. Frankly, for larger small business and home servers (8+ drives) this should be considered a must have, especially given the fact that oftentimes at least two storage servers are maintained for redundancy purposes. IPMIview makes this multi-server management very easy because one can easily VPN into the network and manage multiple servers from one desktop application.

Getting IPMIview

Browsing Supermicro’s site for the latest IPMIview is a bit tricky. One can browse to Supermicro’s IPMI Resources and on the right hand column under resources there are links to where one can download IPMIview and the related manual. Here is the IMPIview ftp link for anyone that wants it. On the FTP site one can find Windows, Linux, and java versions. I have thus far only used the Windows client because I am attached to a Windows PC 24×7. There may be differences between the versions that will not be covered in this article. Since I will be covering the Windows version, the installation procedure simply involves downloading and then running the installer.

Detecting Supermicro Server Boards to Manage with IPMIview

One task that some users find annoying is finding the web GUI for management of each system. The baseboard management controller’s NIC is oftentimes a dedicated management NIC and with DHCP enabled, can make it difficult to find newly connected servers. IPMIview makes this a fairly simple process.
Just as a note, the two systems shown below are Supermicro X8SIL-F and X8ST3-F boards previously reviewed on this site. Currently I am testing NexentaCore and ZFS on one with iSCSI volumes being used by the Hyper-V virtual machines on the other box. I am still tweaking this setup (and trying to add Infiniband to the NexentaCore system) and will do a writeup when or if I get the performance I want.
One has two options, either manually enter the IP range information, or let the utility detect network settings. I was able to use the detect feature, then click “Start” and have IPMIview find the two IPMI 2.0 Supermicro servers on this network.

Auto Detect Supermicro Servers with IPMIview

With DHCP enabled networks where I do not log in regularly (and thus cannot even remember host names) this auto detection utility comes in handy.

Login Screen

After detection, one needs to login to the server. One item of note here is that the credentialing is the same as the web GUI. For those looking for Supermicro IPMI default logins, Supermicro’s default ID and password is ADMIN.

IPMI Successful Login from IPMIview

As a note, that IPMI 2.0 RMCP+ basically means that your password is being encrypted for transmission (MD5).

System Event Log

The BMC on server boards tends to record system events at motherboard/ chassis level. These events include things such as chassis intrusions, CPU temperatures rising beyond thresholds, fan failures and etc. One can see from the below picture that I was playing around with fans in November 2009 on the below system.

IPMI 2.0 System Event Log from IPMIview

Being able to export the log is something that I do not personally use, but I could see how someone managing many nodes would like to bring system events into Microsoft Excel or Access for tracking purposes. On an interesting aside, one can see from the timestamps above that there is almost a year worth of history (7 November 2009 to 12 October 2010) in the log. Then again, that box is mostly used to burn-in hard drives so it does not see the most use.

Sensor Readings

When troubleshooting a machine that is experiencing random lockups, I commonly look to cooling and CPU temperatures as potential culprits. IPMIview has a tab with monitoring information where one can see fan speeds, voltages, CPU temperatures, and things like chassis intrusion alarms.

IPMI 2.0 Sensor Readings from IPMIview

From the above picture (in this case a LGA1366 Xeon), one can see the CPU temperature is fine under 40% CPU load and that the fan that I have blowing air over the CPU cooler is working fine. This screen is somewhat customizable as you can do things like move/ hide the different sub-windows to provide a layout that better represents what you want to see. Since this is OS independent running off of the baseboard management controller, one can see temperatures of a system that is otherwise locked up. I have used this feature on one occasion to identify that a server 45 miles away had a heatsink that was not properly seated (two plastic clips on the stock Xeon fan popped out). The show history option allows a user to see graphs with the displayed values over time.

IPM Device

The IPM device tab is perhaps one of the more useful tabs and features within IPMIview.
Options for graceful reboots, shutdowns, and power cycles inform the OS that the system is being shut down, prior to the power being cycled. Although I have used this feature a few times, typically I just use an OS/ Hypervisor command and ensure that everything shuts down properly. Some systems, especially Windows Server 2008 R2 machines running Hyper-V can take a long time to shutdown or reboot.

IPM Device tab in IPMIview

For those times when a kernel panics or hardware malfunctions and a hard reboot is required, there is the chassis power control. One can reset, turn off (hard/ immediate), turn on, or power cycle as if in front of the server pressing chassis buttons. This is one of those features that comes in handy when working on a system remotely. Many Windows users are all too familiar with hard reboots, and this is the mechanism that lets you conduct a hard reboot from anywhere you have network access. Again, this is a Supermicro feature that one cannot easily emulate with a consumer level motherboard. On the other hand, one could utilize a power source that has the ability to cycle due to a network command. With Supermicro’s IPMIview however, one can look at the monitor output of the system (through KVM-over-IP) and see system health stats prior to cycling power, regardless of OS state.
There is also a BMC cold reset option. I have yet to use this function in a real-world situation, but this is used when one wants to reset the BMC.

BMC Setting

The BMC Setting tab gives a user the ability to setup the BMC MAC addresses so that the BMC functions (like the power cycling) are only available to a private network even if the other LAN connections have publicly accessible IP addresses. Combined with (in many or most cases) separate management NICs, this helps secure the BMC from unauthorized users.

IPMI BMC LAN Settings in IPMIview

Furthermore, the BMC Setting tab has configurable SNMP trap receivers so that the BMC can send critical errors to a SNMP server (see Event Log for errors logging). With IPMIview one can quickly change SNMP settings for multiple servers when required.

Users Tab

The Users Tab lets one add users and set privileges accordingly. This is an especially important tab when you want to give some administrators access to BMC functions.

IPMI User Administration with IPMIview

The three privilege levels are User (things like power cycling are not allowed), Operator (things like changing out of band management parameters not allowed), and Administrator (full access). The FRU information is very useful for being able to find serial numbers and documenting exact version numbers of what is used in a configuration remotely both for asset tracking and replacement purposes. If one ever needs to see the serial number, I would offer that using IPMIview in this case is much easier than looking for the serial number in a running rack mount server.

Text Console

Serial-over-LAN (SoL) is a feature that many Linux and Unix administrators still place a high value on. Personally, I tend not to use this feature as much as many others in day-to-day tasks, but it is nice to see that Supermicro caters to those users through the IPMIview interface.

IPMI Text Console through IPMIview

KVM Console

Frankly, this is probably the best part of IPMIview, and one of the main selling points for purchasing server boards rather than consumer boards for storage builds. The KVM-over-IP functions that Supermicro and other vendors offer allow an administrator to not just troubleshoot OS issues, but also motherboard BIOS and add-in card BIOS issues. When doing things like PXE booting, changing boot devices, or working with RAID card BIOS, KVM-over-IP is many times going to be the difference between physically attending to a server and being able to remotely troubleshoot and configure. In essence, you can VPN into the management network, fire up IPMIview, find the server having issues, and fix a problem from wherever you are.

IPMI KVM Console in IPMIview

Here one can see that the tab shows the familiar Windows 2008 Server R2 logon prompt for a given machine in each tab. This lets a user tab between different servers much like one tabs through different browser windows. While RDP is great for Windows machines, VNC and SSH dominate Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenSolaris. IPMIview makes this all an academic distinction by enabling direct console input, as if one was sitting at each server with a keyboard, video screen, and mouse (KVM) even if they are a thousand miles away.

IPMI KVM Console Keyboard and Disk in IPMIview

Beyond simple KVM redirection, IPMIview also has a built in on screen keyboard that allows one to hit troublesome keystrokes (often F keys while using a Windows client and viewing a ESXi hypervisor screen for example) through a mouse click.
Also one can see that a user has the option to attach a virtual CD or floppy. For tasks like flashing BIOS of controller cards, doing OS installs and the like, being able to mount drive images at the baseboard level is awesome. Supermicro’s virtual disk mounting allows for both mounting local images as well as images sitting in network shares.

Group Administration

Thus far although two systems have been shown in the pictures of this article, IPMIview has been used to manage only one system. Supermicro’s IPMIview does have the ability to manage multiple systems (up to twenty.) This article is getting fairly picture heavy, but one of the best IPMIview features is the ability to monitor and manage groups of servers.

Manage Groups Administration with IPMIview

As can be seen above one can monitor several servers on one screen which is a more user friendly approach than having to log into each server individually. Again, for example purposes I am just using ADMIN/ ADMIN as a login to keep things simple. Once a group has been defined, there are quite a few monitoring dimensions which one can see from the various tabs on the Group Management screen. Going through each would make this article even longer, which I am inclined not to do for the sake of load times.

Manage Group Information with IPMIview

In the above screen shot, one can see one of the most useful IPMIview Group Administration features, which is one that lets you pick attributes and generate a report across the entire group. One can then download the report output into Excel which makes taking inventory a relatively simple task.
Overall, being able to monitor and manage several machines at a time makes the administrator’s job far easier, which is why this type of feature is a mainstay on server grade hardware.

Conclusion

Although one may have surmised at this point that the IPMIview interface is not the flashiest, most modern looking UI out there, the application serves its purpose well of being able to remotely monitor and manage servers. In 2006 when IPMI 2.0 was oftentimes available only as an add-in module sometimes of questionable stability, the technology is a lot more mature now, to the point where many users will opt for built-in IPMI versus network accessible PDUs and external KVM-over-IP solutions. If one is deploying Supermicro based servers with IPMI 2.0 built-in, IPMIview is a great tool to help manage multiple servers from one interface. I do not think that IPMI 2.0 and IPMIview will ever completely remove the need for someone to physically work on a box, since one cannot install a new RAID card/ HBA, memory or hard drives from afar. With that being said, IPMIview is a utility that I use at least four times a week because it is a useful way to manage multiple servers remotely.
http://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-ipmiview-review-remote-server-monitoring-management-ipmi-20-kvm-over-ip/

Apache Killer vs TheXploit.com

2011-09-29T08:32:00.000-07:00

For those of you that haven’t heard (you must live under a rock), there is currently an unpatched DoS attack against all Apache Web servers that can easily be executed from a single computer. A Perl script wasposted to the Full Disclosure mailing list last weekend.

I run Apache 2.2 on TheXploit.com so I thought it’d be an interesting experiment to see what happens. So, here we go: Apache Killer vs. TheXploit

Executing The Attack: Impressive

I fired up a Linux box and ran

perl apachekiller.pl thexploit.com 50
host seems vuln
ATTACKING thexploit.com [using 50 forks]

Less than a minute had gone by and TheXploit.com was completely unreachable. Requests to the site simply said Connecting… but the page never loaded.

Apache Killer Wins: What happened?

The Apache Killer script requests several overlapping ranges of bytes of (the same) data in a single request (approximately 1300). Each one of range of bytes is turned into a fetch of data which is kept in memory.

The second parameter to Apache Killer is the number of Range requests to make – in our case 50. This means that we effectively made 50 * 1300 = 65000 requests – all of which consumed a piece of memory.

That means memory on the server started filling up very quickly. So quickly, that OS page swapping started kicking in. Check out the massive spike in disk io

Apache Killer Disk IO

Next came the email alert

Your Linode has exceeded the notification threshold (1000) for disk io rate by averaging 1631.06 for the last 2 hours.

At this point, the only thing I could do to return to normal operations was restart the server.

Protection

Update Aug 30 – Apache 2.2.20 released to fix this
Until Apache releases an update, the attack is pretty easily avoidable with a simple workaround.

In /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

# drop Range header when more than 5 ranges.
# CVE-2011-3192
SetEnvIf Range (,.*?){5,} bad-range=1
RequestHeader unset Range env=bad-range

Alternatively, if you’re using CloudFlare on your blog – you’re already protected.

So how did your server fair? Did it last longer than a minute?

http://thexploit.com/sec/apache-killer-vs-thexploit-com/

Installing PHP 5.2.x on RedHat ES5, CentOS 5, etc

2011-09-20T19:53:00.000-07:00

To install PHP 5.2.5 (Highest in repository at this time) you can make use of a RPM repository maintained by Remi. He has a repository for each distro, but to save you translating for the ES5 one I’ll give you the commands here. Run the following to get up and running:

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-2.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/el5.i386/remi-release-5-4.el5.remi.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm

You now have the Remi repository on your system, however it is disabled by default. Obviously you don’t want all of your packages been effected by this repository, however to enable it for a specific package, run the following:

yum --enablerepo=remi update php

You should now have the latest PHP5 installed:

# php -v

PHP 5.2.5 (cli) (built: Nov 10 2007 10:52:30)

Copyright (c) 1997-2007 The PHP Group

Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2007 Zend Technologies

Download more packages here http://pkgs.org/centos-5-rhel-5/atomic-x86_64/php-mysql-5.2.17-1.el5.art.x86_64.rpm.html

Install or Upgrade mysql 5.1.50

2011-09-20T19:29:00.000-07:00

Go to downloads: http://files.directadmin.com/services/all/mysql/64-bit/5.1.50/
mkdir mysql
cd mysql
wget http://files.directadmin.com/services/all/mysql/MySQL-client-5.0.37-0.i386.rpm
wget http://files.directadmin.com/services/all/mysql/MySQL-devel-5.0.37-0.i386.rpm
wget http://files.directadmin.com/services/all/mysql/MySQL-server-5.0.37-0.i386.rpm
wget http://files.directadmin.com/services/all/mysql/MySQL-shared-5.0.37-0.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh MySQL-*-5.0.37-0.i386.rpm
/etc/init.d/mysqld restart

How to watch IPTV with VLC

2011-09-14T19:15:00.001-07:00

TPG default settings make you install VLC and the VLC plugin, you must then watch IPTV using
their web page. Personally I don’t like it.

I prefer to use VLC instead.

Open VLC, go into the File menu and select “Open Network” or “Open Network Stream”.

Check HTTP and enter the URL

http://avenard.org/iptv/playlist-tpg-vlc.m3u

Windows

Mac

On Linux you can directly type:

# vlc http://avenard.org/iptv/playlist-tpg-vlc.m3u

Enjoy VLC and IPTV (over wireless)

IPTV over a ssh shell in text mode (just for fun)

http://avenard.com/iptv/VLC.html

All about linux

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Returning an associative array

Returning a string

PHP Documentation

Follow up posts

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PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

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Resolving the paths

special characters in filename cause image to not get created

special characters in filename cause image to not get created

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Drupal: Get vocabulary id by term id

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PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

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Initiate PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

Selecting HTML elements and attributes

Tips and tricks

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Check hard disk space

How do I enable Google Gmail 2-step password verification?

100+ Drupal Views tutorials and resources

Drupal: How To Programmatically Add, Embed Or Insert Views In Your Theme tpl

How to insert a block programmatically with Drupal

Block is generated by a view

User created block

Block is generated by a module

20 Drupal Modules to Boost Your Website’s Functionality

Managing and Displaying Content

1. Menu Block

2. Node Reference URL Widget

3. Views Attach

4. Automatic Nodetitles

5. Nodewords

6. ImageCache

7. Views Slideshow

8. Nodequeue

9. String Overrides

User Engagement and Game Mechanics

10. Better Formats

11. Flag

12. Organic Groups

13. Private Messages

14. User Points

15. User Badges

16. Invite

17. GMap

18. Ubercart

User Registration

19. Login Toboggan

20. Facebook Connect

Conclusion

Related Content

Single Sign-on across Sub-Domains in Drupal with No Extra Modules

Master Site Configuration

Slave Site Configuration

Taking it further

How to install torrentflux on centos 5.5

Supermicro IPMIview Review – Remote Server Monitoring and Management and KVM-over-IP

Getting IPMIview

Detecting Supermicro Server Boards to Manage with IPMIview

Login Screen

System Event Log

Sensor Readings

IPM Device

BMC Setting

Users Tab

Text Console

KVM Console

Group Administration

Conclusion

Apache Killer vs TheXploit.com

Executing The Attack: Impressive

Apache Killer Wins: What happened?