Alex Coplan's questions

I've heard that you can use mod_rewrite to clean up your URLs, and basically I'd like to make it so the .php file extension isn't shown in the URL.

For example, let's say I have the following file structure on a site:

/index.php
/about.php
/contact.php
/css/main.css
/img/animage.jpg
/admin/index.php
/admin/login.php
/admin/admin.php

I would like to make the following basic changes with mod_rewrite:

• When a request is made to the root i.e. /about, if a directory is found called about, then it should behave as a directory nomrally does (i.e. load the index.php from the direcotry).
• If a directory is not found, it should point to about.php
• If a request for a .php file is made, it should 301 redirect to the filename without the .php extension.
• Only the directories which would actually be viewed directly in the browser should have these URL changes (i.e. the root and the admin directory), therefore css and img should have their URLs unchanged.

How can I make those changes using mod_rewrite?

Just took a look at my server auth.log file for the first time in a few days, and noticed that it has no entries before 6:47 this morning.

This is really odd because I dumped that logfile to my laptop when I looked at it a couple of days before, and it was well over 2400 lines of cron jobs, break-in attempts etc.

When I ran cat /var/log/auth.log just now - I was expecting thousands of lines, and got about 50 lines of cron jobs, one break-in attempt and my latest ssh in.

Why has this happened? - Does Ubuntu periodically empty this file? Have I been hacked?

I've just set up a home server to host my site. I can access the site fine from any network apart from my home network.

I thought it might be an issue with DNS, so I decided to ping my domain from my laptop (on my home network), and got the following:

$ ping alexcoplan.co.uk
PING alexcoplan.co.uk (88.108.252.160): 56 data bytes
Request timeout
Request timeout
etc...

Which is really strange, because the domain is resolving to the wrong IP.

I knew that the site was working, because I accessed it on my phone via the cellular network and it loaded fine. Just to double check, I ran terminal emulator on my phone, and pinged my site, and got the following:

$ ping alexcoplan.co.uk
PING alexcoplan.co.uk (88.111.7.117): 56 data bytes

Which is the correct IP.

So that begs the question, why is my domain resolving incorrectly inside the network?

I'm just about finished setting up the basics of my new ubuntu server - I don't have very much experience with Linux.

I only need to be able to send email from my server - but it seems to be really difficult to set it up.

I tried this answer, but I simply get the same error in my log as I did before I installed postfix...

sh: /usr/sbin/sendmail: not found 

I now have postfix installed, and have added the configuration file in my PHP config directory as that answer suggests - but I still encounter the same issue when sending emails with PHP.

What is the easiest way of setting this up to send emails through PHP with ubuntu server?

This might sound like a bit of a strange question, but I've just taken a sample of over 80 IPs which have failed SSH authentication, and I've mapped them using an online mapping tool.

All of them came from China / Korea... my question is how can I block a range of IPs which would stop these countries being allowed to make SSH requests to my machine, as it's just filling up my logs and wasting traffic.

I'm using shorewall as my firewall if that helps.

I recently disabled root login via ssh on my ubunutu server as I was getting quite a lot of ssh attempts with root. I did this by editing the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file and restarting ssh.

However, when I recently checked my log file again, I saw there were numerous other attempts with root in there? - The log message was "failed password" - but if this did work, why would it simply not fail at the first hurdle and say "failed - root login disallowed" or something similar?

Is there a way to tell whether I have configured this correctly?

I'm trying to setup some basic temperature monitoring on my server - (without using third-party tools).

I've installed a couple of libraries on my linux box to get sensors working on my server, and now I can use the sensors command which might return data like the following:

asb100-i2c-1-2d
Adapter: SMBus nForce2 adapter at 5500
in0:          +1.79 V  (min =  +1.39 V, max =  +2.08 V)
in1:          +1.79 V  (min =  +1.39 V, max =  +2.08 V)
in2:          +3.34 V  (min =  +2.96 V, max =  +3.63 V)
in3:          +2.96 V  (min =  +2.67 V, max =  +3.28 V)
in4:          +3.06 V  (min =  +2.51 V, max =  +3.79 V)
in5:          +3.06 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +0.00 V)
in6:          +3.04 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +0.00 V)
fan1:        6136 RPM  (min = 2777 RPM, div = 2)
fan2:           0 RPM  (min = 3534 RPM, div = 2)
fan3:           0 RPM  (min = 10714 RPM, div = 2)
temp1:        +37.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
temp2:        +26.5°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
temp3:         -0.5°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
temp4:        +25.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
cpu0_vid:    +1.750 V

w83l785ts-i2c-1-2e
Adapter: SMBus nForce2 adapter at 5500
temp1:        +30.0°C  (high = +85.0°C)

I then realised I could narrow it down easily by adding | grep temp onto the end of the command, so I tried running sensors | grep temp, and got this:

temp1:        +37.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
temp2:        +26.5°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
temp3:         -0.5°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
temp4:        +25.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
temp1:        +30.0°C  (high = +85.0°C)

I realised that temp3 clearly wasn't functioning correctly, so I revised my command to eliminate that result: sensors | grep temp[1,2,4]

temp1:        +36.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
temp2:        +26.5°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
temp4:        +25.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
temp1:        +30.0°C  (high = +85.0°C)

Now I want to trim it right down, so all I have is a comma-separated string, which might look like this.

+36.0,+26.5,+25.0,+30.0

I can then set this up to submit this data to a server every 5/10 minutes.

How can I achieve this using grep or other commands?

I've recently set up an ubuntu server to host my site - I need to open up port 3306 for MySQL access on my server.

I'm currently using shorewall on my server - how can open incoming connections to 3306 in shorewall? - Here are my current rules (enabling incoming for 80/HTTP and 22/SSH).

ACCEPT        $FW        net        icmp
HTTP/ACCEPT   net        $FW
SSH/ACCEPT    net        $FW

What is the rule name for the MySQL port (3306). Also, is it possible to enable ports just by port not by a name?

I've just followed this tutorial on setting up name-based virtulization in Apache, and it worked really well.

The tutorial basically got you to add a config file to sites-available called yourdomain.com, and then link it to sites-enabled.

By default, apache includes two site config files in sites-available, default and defualt-ssl.

Should you edit these files or remove the link form the sites-enabled directory?

After playing around with this (locally), I realised that by default the default site points to your root /var/www directory, and so if someone goes to the IP of your server directly, could they not then see all the vhosts and other directories in /var/www, unless the default vhost config is changed to point to a different directory, or remvoed from sites-enabled?

I'm just wondering what is commonly done with the default site if the server is being used for name-based virtualization?

Sorry if I got some of this incorrect as I'm quite new to running my own web server.

I just set up a virtual machine running Ubuntu Server, with a LAMP stack and OpenSSH installed.

What now would be the best way to enable that server to run both rails and PHP applications? Would it be best to virtualise the two servers on the host server machine? - Or can they run happily alongside each other?

Would Mongrel would be the best option for the rails server?

I'm relatively new to web development, so please be patient.

I'm primarily an iPhone developer, but have recently done a site for someone else using shared hosting. I could write to files in PHP on that site fine, without having to think about permissions.

I'm in the process of deploying a web service for a new app I'm making, but it's not really going smoothly. The most important difference here is I'm using someone else's server, and just have FTP/DB access.

Basically, I have a load of PHP files which make up my CMS, like so:

mysite.com/admin/manage_news.php
mysite.com/admin/manage_events.php

Those scripts then either edit the database, or files. They can interact with the DB fine, however, my scripts cannot write to the filesystem. They might, for example, attempt to write to the following files:

mysite.com/data/img/event_1.png
mysite.com/data/somefile.txt

This worked fine on my MAMP install (locally), but once deployed to the server, PHP spewed out errors everytime a write was attempted... something like this:

Could not open file "../data/img/someimage.png" for writing.

So I emailed the guy who's running the server, and he came back saying:

Does it work with public permission? (777)

And, it did - but I was very cautious with using public permissions, so disabled it straight away again. I emailed him saying "how can I make my PHP scripts write using standard user permissions", and he said:

Leave it as public, it'll be fine

I reckon it's an ip conflict somewhere in the domain resolution, but I'm not worried about it.

I then emailed him saying "surely this is insecure" or something along those lines, and he replied with the following:

the reality is that there are millions of website, including several that I manage that have 777 on various folders, it's just a way of life.

Could anyone give me some idea of a solution I could give him? Or what I can do to avoid having to use 777? I really don't like the idea of any folders on my site/service to be publicly writeable.

I would very much appreciate your advice as I know very little about web servers.