Linux System Admins Blog

System admins of Promet – an e-commerce, high availability Open Source web shop – share their findings

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Enable/Disable APC on virtual host level

March 18th, 2010 · No Comments

APC (Alternative PHP Cache) is a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code. APC is a great tool to speed up a php driven site and I can’t even think of a big site running on a php framework without an opcode cache (other good choices are eaccelerator or xcache). [...]

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Tags: Performance · Tips and Tricks · sysadmin

php 5.2.9 on RHEL5.x (for Drupal 6)

October 21st, 2009 · No Comments

Latest version of PHP available for RHEL5.x is 5.1.6 and no new RedHat releases are coming as packaging has ceased. You can get PHP 5.3 for RHEL5 from Remi, but it it’s incompatible with latest versions of Drupal, Civicrm or many modules so we need the a 5.2X branch of PHP. This requires building php [...]

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Tags: HowTo · Installation · drupal

HowTo display PHP errors when you don’t have access to php.ini

September 15th, 2009 · 1 Comment

If you are using a shared server, or just have a limited account on your company servers, you might not have access to your php configuration file php.ini (this is usually found under /etc/php.ini in rhel/centos and /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini in debian/ubuntu). Still, in many situations it might be needed to enable php errors in the browser [...]

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Tags: CLI · Centos · Debian · HowTo · Tips and Tricks · sysadmin

enabling allow_url_include locally in cPanel

July 22nd, 2009 · No Comments

When using cPanel the way to enable allow_url_include directive locally (per user) is to create an Virtual Host include:
First create an include file:
/usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/std/2/username/domain.com/custom.conf
Add directive to custom.conf:

php_admin_flag allow_url_include On

Then run to enable include:
/scripts/ensure_vhost_includes –user=username –verbose
Alternatively, enabling allow_url_include globally (server-wide) is done by editing /usr/local/lib/php.ini and adding “allow_url_include = On” directive to the Fopen wrapper section.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; [...]

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Tags: cpanel · hosting · sysadmin

Implementing AES encryption in the front-end

June 20th, 2008 · 1 Comment

This post describes a way to implement data encryption in the front-end of an application and how to make it compatible between a PHP front-end and a Java front-end.
First off we need to decide what type of encryption to use. AES is an encryption standard that has been endorsed by the NSA and is generally [...]

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Tags: Installation

Installing PHP Mcrypt module via dynamic module

June 14th, 2008 · No Comments

Considering that you have an existing php installation compiled from sources, it is very easy to add afterwards new php modules, outside the php binary. This can be achieved without any interruption of the web services, and requires just the following steps:
1. Ensure you have the mcrypt libraries and development tools.
For example on a rhel [...]

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Tags: CLI