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Removing news feeds from Horde

Wed, May 7, 2008

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If you’ve used newer versions of Horde with Plesk, you have probably seen the news feed that runs down the left side of the screen. This newsbar is irritating at best. Here is how to get rid of it.

Open the following file in your text editor:

/usr/share/psa-horde/templates/portal/sidebar.inc
 

Around line 102 comment out the entire if() statement (lines 102-117).

If you upgrade Plesk, you will most likely have to repeat this process.

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.htaccess redirect based on requested domain

Wed, May 7, 2008

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I often use the following .htaccess / mod_rewrite solution to redirect domain names based on the requested domain. The reasons for this are many. Most recent example for me is I had a single site with 5 alias domains but software licensed for only one. Even though I had the alias domains set up on the server it still did not satisfy the license. Add the line below to htaccess and now no matter which of the 5 domains are written in they are re-written to the one with the licence (need to duplicate for each domain). The license is valid since its all the same physical website and everyone is happy. Brilliant!

I am sure there is a more eloquent way of accomplishing this with mod_rewrite - but this gets the job done!

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://otherdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
 

Can also be used to redirect to a landing page based on the requested domain:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com
Rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.any-domain.com/landing-page.html [L]
 

Have a better solution? I’m no mod_rewrite guru so comments are always welcome!

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Desktop Tower Defense

Sat, Apr 26, 2008

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This game is soo addicting. You have been warned - click on the following image at your own risk :)

desktop_tower_defense.jpg

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Joomla 1.0.x Writeable Directories

Fri, Apr 18, 2008

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The following is a list of the directories that must be ‘writeable’ for Joomla 1.0.x to work properly. I’m including it here as a reference. In most cases individuals that install Joomla will simply chmod the permissions for these directories to 707 or 777. I have found through personal experience that this is not very secure (using 707 or 777 anywhere on your site allows a ‘hacker’ who may find a vulnerable script to upload anything they want to your server - aka ebay/paypal spoof sites, etc).

I have found a few solutions, but have not implemented any as of yet. The most promising looks like mod_suphp (aka PHPsuexec). I will post my solution to this issue once it is fully tested. In the mean time I am setting all directories to 755 and files to 644 and temporarily changing them when needed.

administrator/backups/         
administrator/components/       
administrator/modules/         
administrator/templates/       
cache/                         
components/            
images/                
images/banners/                
images/stories/                
language/                      
mambots/                       
mambots/content/       
mambots/editors/       
mambots/editors-xtd/           
mambots/search/                
mambots/system/                
media/                         
modules/               
templates/             
 
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Perfect Permissions for Joomla and Plesk

Fri, Apr 18, 2008

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This post is a continuation (actually a better solution) from my previous post on Joomla Session Save Path

The solution is a slightly modified version from the original post found at rackerhacker.com

Change the umask in ‘/etc/proftpd.conf’ from ‘022′ to ‘002′.

Then, update the directory permissions by running the following at the command line:

cd /var/www/vhosts/[domain.com]
chown -R [username]:psacln httpdocs
chmod -R g+w httpdocs
find httpdocs -type d -exec chmod g+s {} \;
 

Add the ‘apache’ user to the ‘psacln’ group by editing ‘/etc/group’.

Change

psacln:x:2524:
 

to

psacln:x:2524:apache
 

For my server I also had to add psaftp,psaadm:

psacln:x:2524:apache,psaftp,psaadm
 

Joomla also complains about some PHP settings, sometimes including not being able to write to ‘/var/lib/php/session’. To fix the issues, make some adjustments to the ‘/var/www/vhosts/[domain]/conf/vhost.conf’ for the domain (you may have to create this file):

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/[domain]/httpdocs>
php_admin_flag magic_quotes_gpc on
php_admin_flag display_errors on
php_admin_value session.save_path /tmp
</Directory>
 

If the vhost.conf is brand new, then run:

/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -av
 

Make sure Apache runs with your new configuration:

# httpd -t (check your work)
# /etc/init.d/httpd reload (service httpd restart on my server)
 

Done! No more errors on the install screen and no more apache/ftpuser issues with uploading files.

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