I’m trying the DansGuardian content filtering proxy at home. But it wouldn’t compile on my modern Snow Leopard machine.
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Problem:

Visual Studio 2005 complains,

Error screenshot (read text on left)

Database schema could not be retrieved for this connection. Please make sure the connection settings are correct and that the database is online. This server version is not supported. You must have Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 or later.

Except I have MS SQL Server 2008 Express.

Solution:

Download and install this CTP (Community Technology Preview) which addresses the issue.

The problem:

I like using Subversion to deploy web content to production servers. I check in everything while I’m working on the development copy, then check out onto the server when it’s ready.

Subversion creates a .svn directory contain readable copies of all your files, which is bad for server-processed files like .php or .aspx that you don’t want readable by, say, Google Hackers.

I have thought about this before but when I went to do it I couldn’t find any clear guides online. I did find this question at Server Fault, which is a newish sister of Stack Overflow, which reminds me kind of Experts Exchange but without the suck. Except that in this case the answers sucked. So I figured it out and added my answer and am posting it here too: More …

It sucks when server disks fill up. I have Nagios set up to notify me well before it’s a problem, but it happens annoyingly frequently, and it’s always the same cause: log files.

Symfony’s production environments don’t create logs, but the development environments do, and for one project I had several batch jobs logging to the myproject/log directory. (Troubleshooting batch jobs without logs is just crazy).

I was going to use symfony log:rotate, but

• I would need one cron job for each log
• I had permission issues since some of the logs belong to apache and others to root
• Everything else on the machine, pretty much, is managed with the standard Linux utility logrotate. Logrotate has been around for about 174 Linux Years, and is common to most distributions.

So here’s how I did it using with logrotate.

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So I have to get a certification to progress in my job, and it needs to involve Microsoft .NET. OK. So I’m working through the MCPD (Microsoft Certified Professional Developer) .NET web development training kit, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. In theory it’s all I need prepare for the 3 exams for the MCPD, 70-536, 70-528, 70-547.

Thoughts so far:

1. C# is surprisingly well-designed. Especially compared to say, PHP, which was only designed after the fact.
2. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the elegant high tech tool metaphor gracing the cover.
3. I love books instead of training, especially “online training”. But I need to map out a schedule and stick to it or it will get lost amid many other things.

So here, I went through the books and with Perl’s help, added up the estimates for each section, adding a 10 minute review on each chapter.

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I manage a growing number of symfony-based Intranet apps that share a common look-and-feel. I use the same stylesheet and images on them all, and it I am nervous every time I make Yet Another Copy of the same files, knowing that I’m duplicating them and causing trouble for myself.

Also, as I wrote in my post about custom error pages, I have error pages set up for each, and I hate copying them. So I have invested some time into building a plugin containing the visual assets and the customized error pages, so that it’s easier to keep them uniform across all the apps I work on, and so that it will be that much quicker to build new projects.

I don’t think anyone outside my company will want my plug-in, but these instructions will hopefully be useful for anyone who wants to do the same thing.

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As security increases, convenience tends to decrease. But in this case we gain some of both.

CONCEPTS

Problem 1: Brute force SSH attackers

I recently made a Linux machine accessible by port 22 from the Internet, so I could remotely administer it with SSH. Within a day or two, there were hosts from all over the Internet trying to log in using random usernames (‘root’, ‘dave’, ‘mysql’, ‘neo’) and random passwords.

Problem 2: Weak system passwords

System passwords are becoming easier to guess by brute force every time a new processor comes out. It doesn’t matter how complicated your alphabet soup is, it’s just not long enough, or won’t be long enough eventually. The bad guys also have botnets full of machines and all the time in the world.

Working around problems 1 and 2: Key authentication

An SSH key is complex (random) and much, much longer than your password (see Wikipedia for more details about how public-key cryptography works). You store the private part of your key securely on your client machine, and tell the server to trust only the public key that goes with it. BUT, you should really use a nice, long, complex passphrase to lock up your private key so that someone who gains access to it can’t get free access to all your servers, which leads to

Problem 3: I’m too lazy to unlock my inconvenient SSH key all the time

I log in to different machines all the time, from a bunch of different workstations. But, I have a long passphrase on my SSH key. Too long to type every time, especially if I’m just looking at something or transferring a file or two.

Solution to problem 3: A key agent

An SSH key agent lets you unlock your key and load it into memory once, and then automatically uses it to get you in to all your servers. SUPER convenient.

Problem 4: It’s confusing

I tried to explain it to a friend recently and found nowhere on the internets that explained it all in one place.

Coming up: detailed instructions for getting started with SSH keys and using a key agent on Mac OS X (command line), Windows (PuTTY and Cygwin commandline ssh), and Linux/Unix (command line).

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I’ve always had a weakness for “preferences”. I spent hours going through all the available preference panes on the first Mac I had access to (an SE II I think, ca. 1989), tweaking this and that to get it to look as “customized” as possible. Hours setting up font and styles on school assignments, days banging on my Emacs config to be more like I want.

So it’s been secretly irking me for a while that although I installed the very nice WP-Syntax code highlighting plugin for this WordPress blog, it was hard to get it to display things in reverse-video like I prefer for all my terminal and text editor windows, and like I love in the online Symfony documentation. It’s just nicer on the eyes, you know? Digging in, I found the GeSHI syntax highlighter to be impressive in scope but scary in its inline-style-generating detail.

So today, to solve the problem for more than just me, I published my very first WordPress plugin, wp-syntax-hacktify. Very educational! I like the plugin system at wordpress.org.

The plugin tells GeSHI to use stylesheets instead and provides a slightly more commented/documented stylesheet as an example for if you’d like to override it with your own color scheme.

So now my code samples can be all nicer and stuff, like this:

  /**
   * Print a string to the log using 'debug' level.  For printf-style
   * debugging.
   *
   * @param      string $m      The string to log
   * @return     nothing
   */
  public static function debug ($m) {
    if (sfConfig::has('sf_logging_enabled') && sfConfig::get('sf_logging_enabled'))
      {
        if ($logger = sfContext::getInstance()->getLogger()) {
          $logger->debug($m);
        }
      }
    elseif (sfConfig::has('bhLDAP_echo_debugging') && sfConfig::get('bhLDAP_echo_debugging'))
      {
        echo "# $m\n";
      }
    else
      {
//      echo $m;
      }
  }
 
  /**
   * Dump a data structure to the log at the 'debug' level.  Uses
   * print_r() formatting.
   *
   * @param      mixed $v         The variable/data structure to dump
   * @param      string $label    An optional label to print in front of the dump
   * @return     nothing
   */
  public static function debugDump ($v, $label = "var dump") {
    self::debug("$label:  " . print_r($v, true));
  }

Now the code on my blog can look nice even if it’s terrifically hacky!

For every Symfony project I work on, I eventually want to get rid of the tasteful brown error pages with the Symfony logo on them and install my own, so the users don’t get weirded out and somehow start thinking “Symfony = error”. Also, I’m probably overly optimistic, but it would be nice if there was a valid email address on the error page so I could hear users complain.

The documentation is good, but I want a simpler recipe that also accounts for all the forseeable errors, even those that don’t get to Symfony. Some details vary by version, but in short, for symfony 1.1: More …

Yay! When the books and Microsoft TechNet and Google and the blogosphere and a good night of sleep and even my genius coworker left me stumped on a technical question, the Kiwi named Blorgbeard got me through.

Stack Overflow is my new favorite thing on the Internet. Seriously, it’s even better than Lolcats .