baudtack's questions

I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 on this server. I had PHP 5.2 installed via the package manager. I removed it to install PHP 5.3.1 by hand. I built the packages like so

./configure --prefix=/opt/php --with-mysql --with-curl=/usr/bin --with-apxs2=/usr/bin/apxs2
make
make install

This installed PHP 5.3.1 in /opt/php/

$ php -v
PHP 5.3.1 (cli) (built: Dec  7 2009 10:51:14) 
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Zend Technologies

However, when I try to start Apache I get this.

 # /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
 * Restarting web server apache2       
  apache2: Syntax error on line 185 of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf: 
  Syntax error on line 1 of /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.load: 
  Cannot load /usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so into server: 
  /usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so: undefined symbol: OnUpdateLong
                                                                     [fail]

Any ideas what's causing this error? All the references I can see have to do with building php5 packages for php4 or the like. PHP4 has never been installed on this machine.

The company I work for has multiple offices spread throughout the US. We're trying to come up with a solution that would allow secure file sharing across all the offices. What we are thinking at the moment is:

• Setting up a Linux server at each site and mounting the shared directories from the other servers via sshfs. This way the clients would only directly access their local server.

• Another possibility is to do data replication via rsync between all the servers. This would allow us to also preserve data in the event of catastrophic failure. The thing we are worried about is corrupt data being replicated across all the servers and us losing any chance of recovery. It might be possible to solve this by doing hourly rsync between the servers and daily incremental backup to an external drive at our office to preserve data from the past.

• We would probably use LDAP to deal with user account replication and access control.

Neither of the solutions "feels" right, for lack of a better term. What would you do to solve this situation?

EDIT: We would prefer a Linux based solution to avoid the costs and hassle of Windows licensing. Also, the IT team is much more familiar with Linux than Windows Servers. It should also be noted that we're not against outsourcing this so that the data would live out on the cloud somewhere. Assuming the price is reasonable.

I'm going to be deploying an Linux machine as a sort of public terminal at a remote location. I'd like to be able to access it remotely via SSH for maintenance but I don't want to keep a port open on the remote firewall for the rare occasions I need to access this machine. I've though about a simple script to create a reverse SSH tunnel to a machine on the outside, but I'd rather not have to have a user have to do anything when I need to access it. Any ideas?

Update: I've decided to go with my original plan of a script to create a reverse ssh tunnel. While other suggested solutions, such as port knocking would be more along the lines of what I really want to do, in this case, I don't have any access to configure the router other than walking a user through a config. shudder