There are fundamental differences between PHP scripts that are run by a web request, and those that are run from the command line. One of the main ones is that the environment settings will be completely different, including the path. Every few years I forget this and it comes back to bite me.
Writing Vietnamese correctly requires diacritics that aren’t commonly used in Western languages. Miss one out and you completely change the meaning of what you’re writing. As I frequently communicate in Vietnamese it’s important to be able to input diacritics, which is a bit of problem since Western keyboards don’t include them. On my own laptop I use IBus to allow me to switch into UniKey mode, but it’s a bit fiddly to set up, and it’s not an option when I’m using a different computer.
Today I had to recover a Debian server after the /var partition was accidentally deleted. All the user generated data (primarily website content and databases) was backed up, and I also had access to a backup copy of the installed package list as generated by dpkg --get-selections. The instructions below don’t go into full detail, but hopefully they will set you on the right track. They should also work for Ubuntu installs.
If this happens to you, don’t panic, and whatever you do, don’t shut down or reboot the server!
In this post, I describe how to upgrade the firmware on an LSI MegaRAID SAS controller to the latest version. Upgrading the firmware is recommended before making certain changes, e.g. installing a battery backup unit. These instructions have been tested on an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i but should also work for other models using LSI’s 2108 chipset.
In this article I'll walk through how to set up Composer, Drupal 8 (or 9), and Drush in a way that means we can have multiple users running the same centralised version of Drush when appropriate (ie. when a Drupal site isn't set up as a Composer project, or a project doesn't include its own copy of Drush) which means that our team can keep using Drush seamlessly without having to install a separate copy of Composer and Drush for each user or each project on our servers. This approach should also make it easy to keep things up to date and change the configuration later on if needed.
Email commonly includes the sender’s address in two places. The From header in the message body is the one that most people are aware of, and this is the address that email recipients see. However, the sending mail server also adds a Return-Path before the message body. Recipients don’t generally see this address, but it is important for two reasons. First, it is used in a number of anti-spam checks. Second, it’s the address that typically receives non-delivery reports if a message can’t be delivered for any reason.
Here’s how to set up a VPN that has all these features:
It should also work on Windows*, and Android via the StrongSwan app, but I haven’t tested it. Please post about your experiences using this guide with other devices in the comments!
MySQL has supported TLS for TCP/IP connections for some time now, but there are a number of subtleties involved in getting it working. If you need to allow remote access to your databases, you really ought to be using TLS to protect your login details and any confidential data that might be transferred. Here are the various steps required to enable TLS in MySQL on Debian and Ubuntu. Note that MySQL still refers to everything as SSL, but it’s more correct to call it TLS as SSL is deprecated these days. The same instructions also ought to work for MariaDB.
At some point in the last few months, ProFTPd stopped working on several of the servers we maintain. Since it was working before, we didn’t change any of the configuration files, and it stopped working on several servers independently, I’m guessing that this was due to a change in the default config of ProFTPd, or at least the Debian Jessie version of ProFTPd. There’s an easy workaround but not a real solution at time of writing.
There is a lot of conflicting advice out on the internet about how best to construct an email with attachments using standard Python libraries. None of it explains why to do things in certain ways. Here is a definitive, tested bit of code that will create an email with attachments that will work correctly. I’m posting it here so I don’t need to spend any time working it all out again!