PFWD : blog.peterfisher.me.uk

Today I needed to copy some records from one table to another.  Both tables didn’t have the same structure so I couldn’t select everything regardless of fields and dump the data into the second table. 

Instead I needed to SELECT the fields to INSERT INTO tableA

I then had to SELECT the field to copy from in the second table (tableB).

This is how the query looked

Comments(1)

Its here Google Chrome has finally landed. Whoop

I’ve been testing some sites on it for the past 30 minutes and my overall impression is that it’s a very good clean and quick  browser. In fact I’m using it now to write this post.

My main point of interest lies in it’s rapid speed of opening up applications. Google Chrome allocates each tab to its own segment of memory which means that if one tab dies then the rest won’t follow. Simply close the broken tab and carry on.  

Obviously I couldn’t go through each feature in 30 minutes and it’s only in Beta version so I’m not going to jump on the Google band wagon just yet. However I am quite pleased with it’s performance. 

One thing it doesn’t have are any add-ons that FireFox has but I’m sure that in time these will be popping up in the open source community.  

Overall, I’m happy that another open source browser has surfaced as this helps developers like my self to create a better internet.

Comments(1)

I’ve got my hands on a nice server and when installing the phpmyadmin package I came across this error:

What’s happening is that the request is looking for the package in the E drive (the CD drive) and not in the universe repository. It can be a bit of a confusing error so I’ve decided to document how to solve it. I hope that it may prove useful for some.

Firstly the sources.list needs to be modified.

Simply do the following:
1. Modify the sources list:

Uncomment the last two lines:

2.Then update the server

3. After any update have been installed you can finally install phpmyadmin

Hope this helps someone

Comments(0)

Each Ubuntu server displays the following message when a user logins in via SSH:

To change the above all thats need is to modify the /etc/motd file

I use nano for this

Once saved log back into the server and the message will be changed.

Comments(0)

A website is made up from several folders which contain files such as style sheets and server sided code. By default these files and folders can be accessed via a browser leaving whatever contents in those folder open to prying eyes.

Lets say we have the following folder structure. (This is not the typical structure that I would use myself but is a good enough example). If a browser was pointed at www.site.com/css/ the user would see the code in a text format.

You may think that leaving you style sheet directory open isn’t much of a big risk to your site but what about your /cmd/inc folder.  This could hold php files that contain database access details or the /img directory may be a family photo album. Is it a risk now?

Closing the door to all

To deny direct access to your folders  all that is needed is a .htaccess file and three words…. “Deny from all”

Simply create a .htaccess file in the folder you want to lock down and add the following to it:

Now if you try and access that folder via a browser you will get a forbidden warning and a 404 error will executed.

Leaving it open to a selected few

You may wish to allow relatives access to your photo albums in your/img directory but still keep it closed to everyone else. In order to achieve this you will need to know the IP address of the machines that you want to allow access too. Once you have these details modify your .htaccess file to look like this:

Tarting up the 404 page

When a user tries to access a forbidden directory they will redirected to a 404 page. This looks a bit ugly and not very professional. In my previous post (htaccess error pages) I have discussed how to use htaccess to redirect certain error pages to nicely formatted pages which can consist of server and client sided code.

Conclusion

I hope you will agree it doesn’t take to much effort to secure your folders. If you have loads of directory’s that you want to keep private you could link them symbolically to a htaccess file outside of the root folder.  But remember that all the linked htaccess files will have the same settings so I would only do this if you don’t want to allow any exceptions.

Comments(0)

In the PHP Ini configuration file there is a setting called upload_max_filesize which controls the maximum size that a file can be when uploaded via a form. Any files that are larger then the set value will not be uploaded and result in error code 1 (The file is to large).

If your application allows users to uploaded images or pdfs to a site then the chances are you will need to adjust this value to allow bigger files to be uploaded.

Unless you have access to the php ini file you will need to use htaccess to set the new limit.

Add the following to your htaccess file

This will now allow you to upload files that are up to 8 megabytes in size.

Further resources

PHP.net

Comments(0)

I haven’t been able to find any support for the `GROUP BY` SQL clause in model file.

The model uses a HABTM relationship and I’ve tried adding the clause in the controller:
$list = $this->Post->find(’all’,null,array(’group’=>’Post.Status’));

I have opened a post on Google Groups to see if anyone can help me out.

Comments(0)

I ran into a strange cakePHP error the other day. I was adding new tables to a database as well as creating their models and controllers but I couldn’t make the scaffolding to work. The debug message insisted that the tables could not be found.

After double checking for typos in file names I turned to goggle for help and quickly found a logical solution. The models are cached and the new model for the new table wasn’t included in the cached files and thus the error was shown.

CakePHP caches an awful lot of data to make your application run faster and reduce load on the server. The cached files are found in the tmp directory in the app folder. If you have a look in there you will find a model directory.

My new model wasn’t amongst these cached files and that was causing the error. While Googling further I found that cakePHP will rebuild the files in the cached directories if they are not present.
So by deleting all the cached models and refreshing the site cake rebuilt the cached files including my missing model. This fixed the error and I could get on with my work.

Comments(0)

The following article describes 10 of the most basic security practices that any Linux administrator should undertake. They should be quite routine and self explanatory but it’s always good to be reminded.
I especially like point 10:

A message seen twice is better than no message at all

If aren’t sure that your secure then the chances are your not!

Personally my security procedures include the applications firestarter and clam. I have also written a bash backup script that creates archives of specified folders each week.
However I should check my log files more regularly. Maybe I should look into building a script that can do this automatically.

All the other points are quite valid and should be taken seriously.
Hats off to the author

read more | digg story

Comments(0)

I have updated my post CSS IE FF Hacks and have added the broken Identifier hack to the list.(point 3.1)
This hack allows you to change a style declaration for all versions of Internet Explorer including version 7. When added below a valid style deceleration the outcome will be correctly rendered in all other browsers and different in the versions of IE.

Comments(0)