Tequila Fish

I received the following in my Apache error_log when attempting to load the ionCube loader in my php.ini file:

This is because ionCube must be loaded before any of the Zend extensions are. So if you have the Zend extension/optimizer loaded, your php.ini should look like this to get ionCube to work:

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Now playing: Tommy McCook & The Aggrovators - A Loving Melody
via FoxyTunes

After getting Cacti up and running successfully on Fedora Core 5, I had a problem with the graphing. Caci was receiving the SNMP data correctly (the graph legends would show the proper data values), but the actual neato colors and lines were absent in the graph image. After some research I found a fix: Everything in the rra file must be owned by the cacti user, or the user running the poller crontab. Pretty simple:

Once the rra files were owned by the cacti user, the graphs started to appear in all their colored and lined splendor!

Here’s a quickie tutorial on how to add Virtual Hosts to Apache on Ubuntu. This tutorial assumes that you have a basic understanding of Apache configuration and that your Apache is installed and able to serve websites.

1. cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
2. sudo vim yourdomain.com.conf and enter your VirtualHost directive. Below I’ve put the most basic example, see Apache docs for details and additional features:
   <VirtualHost *>
   ServerName yourdomain.com
   DocumentRoot /home/youruser/public_html
   </VirtualHost>

   Save & exit.

3. sudo vim /etc/hosts and add your new domain to the 127.0.0.1 locahost line so it looks like this:
   127.0.0.1 localhost yourdomain.com

   Save & exit.

4. Enable your new virtualhost:
   sudo a2ensite yourdomain.com.conf
5. Reload the Apache configuration:
   sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

That’s it! Repeat for each of your VirtualHosts.

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Now playing: Alèmayèhu Eshèté - Tchero Adari Nègn
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I recently purchased a cheapie Dell Inspiron 530 to use as a new local devbox with the intent of installing Fedora 7 on it (the machine came with Ubuntu Desktop pre-installed). Foolish me, I just assumed that if Ubuntu was compatible with the hardware, then Fedora surely would be as well. WRONG. Fedora was unable to detect/install both the SATA controller and the integrated ethernet port. After a few hours trying to get Fedora to install, I decided to give up and give Ubuntu Server a try. Of course it wasn’t easy, so here are some of my notes in getting Ubuntu Server installed onto the Dell Inspiron 530.

I wanted to keep it simple so I just installed all of the defaults presented by the installer, including the LAMP package. Everything installed fine, however, the Integrated Network card was not detected/installed, so here’s how to get it up and running by compiling and installing the driver.

1. First we need to install some prerequisites that are required in order to compile the driver. Make sure your Ubuntu Server CD is in the CD drive and run the following:
   sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.20-15-server
   sudo apt-get install gcc
2. Download the ethernet driver from Intel. The one I used is e1000-7.6.5.tar.gz. If you can’t find it at Intel, just Google the filename and I’m sure you’ll be able to find it somewhere.
3. Burn the driver to a CD, mount it on your Ubuntu machine, and copy it to a local dir:
   sudo mkdir /mnt/cdrom
   sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
   sudo cp /mnt/cdrom/e1000-7.6.5.tar.gz /usr/src
4. Compile and install the driver:
   cd /usr/src
   tar xfvz e1000-7.6.5.tar.gz
   cd e1000-7.6.5/src
   sudo make install
   sudo modprobe e1000
5. Now configure your network card:
   sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces and your file should look like this (substitute your IP of choice):
   # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
   # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

   # The loopback network interface
   auto lo
   iface lo inet loopback

   # This is a list of hotpluggable network interfaces.
   # They will be activated automatically by the hotplug subsystem.
   mapping hotplug
   script grep
   map eth0

   # The primary network interface
   auto eth0
   iface eth0 inet static
   address 192.168.1.66
   netmask 255.255.255.0
   network 192.168.1.0
   broadcast 192.168.1.255
   gateway 192.168.1.1

6. Setup your DNS servers:
   sudo vim /etc/resolv.conf and it should look like this (I am using OpenDNS here but you can substitute your own:
   nameserver 208.67.222.222
   nameserver 208.67.220.220
7. Restart the network:
   sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
8. Upgrade your system for good measure:
   sudo apt-get upgrade

That should be enough to get your Ubuntu Server up and running on the Dell Inspiron 530 with full network connectivity. Once you’re up and running, here are some other tweaks I did, although some of these may be personal preference.

1. I don’t like Ubuntu’s sudo setup (I prefer log in in as root when needed). Out of the box the root account is disabled and your default account is given admin rights to run commands via sudo. To get around this, simply reset root’s password:
   sudo passwd root

   Now you will be able to su - and log in as root directly.

2. Install SSH
   sudo apt-get install ssh
3. Disable root login to SSH:
   sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set the following:
   PermitRootLogin no
4. Change the MySQL root password:
   mysqladmin -u root password “newpassword”
5. Enable Apache’s mod_rewrite:
   sudo a2enmod rewrite
   sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
6. Install some other useful goodies:
   sudo apt-get install vim
   sudo apt-get install php5-mcrypt
   sudo apt-get install php5-curl
   sudo apt-get install php5-gd
   sudo apt-get install php-pear
   sudo pear upgrade-all
   sudo pear install mdb2
   sudo pear install pear/MDB2#mysqli

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Now playing: Apparat - Steinholz (Monolake Remix)
via FoxyTunes

If you’re trying to write some text using PHP/GD & the imagettftext function, you will of course need some TrueType fonts to work with. I’ve found a great set of fonts available for free: Webcore. Webcore contains all the fonts webdesigners constantly use, things like Arial, Tahoma, Verdana, Georgia, etc..

To install, simply download to your server and install the RPM (Fedora):

These fonts will now be available to you in /usr/share/fonts/webcore/.

Make sure you specify the full path when calling imagettftext(), eg:

Your mileage may vary if you are using a different distribution, but the docs state that this RPM should work on other distros.

If you’ve ever tried to edit a Windows-created file in Unix or OSX, you’ve probably encountered a messy translation in line breaks: A file full of “^M” characters. There is an easy search/replace you can use in vi/vim to format the file Unix-style:

I went to update my Fedora Core 5 machine today, and received the following error:

I tried running yum clean all but it didn’t help. After looking around I found that all of my repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ had their baseurl values commented out. Don’t ask me how that happened, I have no idea. Simply uncommenting all the baseurl values in all my repo files fixed the problem, and yum is once again running as expected. So if you run into this problem, make sure everything is set up right in /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo