Geek Stuff – Page 3

Novell gets $348 million from Microsoft

This is a little old but I thought iI would go ahead and throw something on my site. .

Novell has published additional details about its agreements with Microsoft concerning Windows and Linux interoperability and patents. It seems the company is receiving an up-front payment of $348 million from Microsoft, for SLES subscription "certificates" and for patent cross-licensing. Spread the word: digg this story In Novell's Form 8-K submission to the SEC (Security and Exchanges Commission), Entry into a Material Definitive Agreement, the company states that "Under the Business Collaboration Agreement, which expires January 1, 2012, Novell and Microsoft will market a combined offering. The combined offering will consist of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and a subscription for SLES support along with Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Virtual Server and Microsoft Viridian that will be offered to customers desiring to deploy Linux and Windows in a virtualized setting."

What exactly does this mean? Hard to say at this point. Is this strange? Not as strange as one might initially think. If you recall, Microsoft did something very similar with Apple a few years back.

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Fatal error: Call to undefined function: pn_dbmsgerror()

Had a strange error message on one of the sites I manage. It said "Fatal error: Call to undefined function: pn_dbmsgerror()". This is a Post Nuke CMS system and the error occurred after a reboot to the physical server and we made some space on a partition that had filled up.

Turned out the problem was a corrupted table in the Post Nuke database. The table _referer got twisted and didn't know what it wanted to do with itself. This table is only used for tracking where people come from who visit your site, so since I had a back up of the database, I just nuked the table and copied over the table from the back up database. That got everything up and running again perfectly.

Backing Up and Restoring Your MySQL Database

Do you need to change your web host or switch your database server? This is probably the only time when you really think of backing up your MySQL data. If you've got a website with a database or your custom database running for your applications, it is imperative that you make regular backups of the database. In this article, I will outline two easy ways of backing up and restoring databases in MySQL.
The easiest way to backup your database would be to telnet to the your database server machine and use the mysqldump command to dump your whole database to a backup file. If you do not have telnet or shell access to your server, don't worry about it; I shall outline a method of doing so using the PHPMyAdmin web interface, which you can setup on any web server which executes PHP scripts.

Playing with mysqldump

If you have either a shell or telnet access to your database server, you can backup the database using mysqldump. By default, the output of the command will dump the contents of the database in SQL statements to your console. This output can then be piped or redirected to any location you want. If you plan to backup your database, you can pipe the output to a sql file, which will contain the SQL statements to recreate and populate the database tables when you wish to restore your database. There are more adventurous ways to use the output of mysqldump.

A Simple Database Backup:

You can use mysqldump to create a simple backup of your database using the following syntax.

mysqldump -u [username] -p [password] [databasename]> [backupfile.sql]

[username] - this is your database username
[password] - this is the password for your database
[databasename] - the name of your database
[backupfile.sql] - the file to which the backup should be written.

The resultant dump file will contain all the SQL statements needed to create the table and populate the table in a new database server. To backup your database 'Customers' with the username 'sadmin' and password 'pass21' to a file custback.sql, you would issue the command:

mysqldump -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers> custback.sql

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Configuring Apache to use a .htaccess file

Just a good step by step on how to configure Apache to use a .htaccess file. I rarely ever use this method except in testing so I always forget.

First, get your web administrator to enable your use of .htaccess files. This requires a stanza in ServerRoot/conf/access.conf like this:

AllowOverride AuthConfig

where /home/webber is replaced by your home directory. Without this, the usual default is AllowOverride None, which means that .htaccess files are ignored. The above stanza allows .htaccess control in all subdirectories of the specified Directory.

Set up a reasonably secure directory for the password (and optionally the group) files. This directory should not be in the web document tree! If it is, someone who can learn or guess the URL of the password file can fetch it and try to crack the passwords. (This refers to visitors from elsewhere on the Internet. There is no simple way to prevent users with accounts on the web server host itself from snooping in the password file, so we will have to settle for security by obscurity and trust them not to try too hard.)
Let us name this directory http-etc by analogy to the Unix /etc directory where the system passwd and group files reside. Place it in your home directory (not in public_html) so that it is outside URL space. Give it permission 701 = rwx-----x meaning you the owner can do anything, and the web server, running as the ordinary user apache, can access the directory but cannot list it (so it must know the file names in advance).1

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