Some time ago, I posted a small tutorial how to install phpundercontrol in a fresh Debian Etch machine. As Debian Lenny is now out for some time I’d like to update this small tutorial for its changes.
The good thing: You don’t need to use backports anymore – the sun-java6-bin/sun-java6-jre packages are available in the lenny non-free tree.
Therefore, the first thing to do is check your /etc/apt/sources.list if it checks for non-free packages (does not per default).
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free
The rest stays mostly the same:
# update apt to include non-free packages
apt-get update
# install packets (java and subversion)
apt-get install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre
apt-get install subversion
# add symlink from /usr/bin/java to /bin/java for the cruisecontrol start script
ln -s /usr/bin/java /bin/java
# install apache (mainly for phpmyadmin) and php5 + cli
apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork
apt-get install php5 php5-cli php5-dev
apt-get install php-pear make
# install xdebug (needed for phpunit)
pecl install xdebug
echo "zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/xdebug.so" >> /etc/php5/cli/php.ini
# install phpunit and phpundercontrol via pear
pear upgrade --force pear
pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
pear channel-discover components.ez.no
pear install phpunit/phpunit
pear install --alldeps channel://components.ez.no/Graph
pear install --alldeps channel://pear.phpunit.de/phpundercontrol-0.5.0
# get and extract cruisecontrol
apt-get install unzip wget
cd ~
wget http://freefr.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/cruisecontrol/cruisecontrol-bin-2.8.3.zip
unzip cruisecontrol-bin-2.8.3.zip -d /opt
cd /opt
ln -s cruisecontrol-bin-2.8.3 cruisecontrol
# run phpundercontrol modifications against cruisecontrol
phpuc install /opt/cruisecontrol
# first testrun
cd /opt/cruisecontrol
./cruisecontrol.sh
This small script demonstrates how to check if a user has visited a particular url with his browser using css and javascript. Simple trick, small script, but could be dangerous – and you don’t see a damn thing.
The only protection against this of which i know is NoScript or just turning off JavaScript in your browser…
If you want to rotate dom elements, webkit offers you
-webkit-transform: rotate(0deg);
and firefox offers you
-moz-transform: rotate(0deg);
I hacked together a small demo rotating dom elements with css including some animation with jscript/jquery.
Today I solved a problem I had with check_apachestatus_auto.pl executed via NRPE.
Running the command as root worked fine but, running as user “nagios” just gave no output – which translated to the error message “NRPE: Unable to read output error” on the Nagios NRPE Client.
After checking file permissions, any debug modes and logs i found… i finally got to /tmp and there was it: “127.0.0.1……”, a temporary file created by that particular check plugin. Since i tested the plugin first as root, the file had root-only permissions, and the plugin executed as nagios just stopped somewhere while not being able to use/overwrite that file.
I deleted that particular file, and everything works fine now…
I found this nice premade admin panel layout on themeforest.net, a single licence is just 15$ (10-projects licence 45$, which I bought).
Author description:
Complex Liquid Admin template that contains a login page as well as a modular content page that includes all the elements you could possibly need in your admin. From these elements you should be able to generate any required page.
Please open the preview to check out all the elements.
Liquid as oposed to a fixed size means all the screen real-estate is used in the most efficient manner possible and also eliminates compatibility issues with non-standard, very low or very high screen resolutions.
Tableless CSS coding, cross-browser compatible and very stylish. Impress your customers today !
The template includes all page .psd files as well as slices and should be Easy to customise with medium knowledge of Photoshop and CSS .
Later edit : This template also contains rectangular notification boxes (ex. positive, negative, site message etc.) like our FlexiAdmin, however the shots don’t show this. So if you need these no worries, you will find them in the download package.
I’m impressed with the details and “amount of work” you get for that small price. I’m definitely going to use this in some projects – at least in my own 
Links:
My newest toy arrived today: OCZ Apex SSD 120Gb – a very fast Solid State Drive. The manufacturer tags it with “230mb/s read, 160mb/s write, <0.3ms access time”.
After my six hour hassle of (trying to…) moving the boot partition from my old harddrive to the new one (see the full report/steps below), I was curious about the first performance test, which I used HD Tune for.
This is the result for my old harddrive, a Samsung HD642JJ:
Raw data:
HD Tune: SAMSUNG HD642JJ Benchmark
Transfer Rate Minimum : 55.0 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 102.8 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 83.0 MB/sec
Access Time : 13.2 ms
Burst Rate : 135.3 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 4.5%
Temperature : 25°C
And this is the result for my new SSD (OZC Apex SSD 120GB):
Raw data:
HD Tune: OCZ APEX_SSD Benchmark
Transfer Rate Minimum : 1.4 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 172.7 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 138.1 MB/sec
Access Time : 0.2 ms
Burst Rate : 129.5 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 5.5%
Temperature : 44°C
As I said before, I moved my bootpartition to the new drive. These are my subjective feelings about the new system:
- The Windows bootup isn’t that much faster, but I didn’t measure the startup time of the old harddrive. (Still too long…)
- Applications start much faster now. I think this really is the point where the ridiculous low access time of the SSD kicks in. Zend Studio i.e. is down from ~30 secs to 12. (And I haven’t switched the projects/workspace to a new SSD partition yet!)
The application startup speed, and working with big filecount-intensive projects were the main reasons for me to try out a SSD. So far (this still is my impression after only 2-3 hours of usage) I am very satisfied with the results.
The temperature of the SSD is ~20° warmer, but I think even 44°C is not high enough to care about.
In about one month I will provide you with even more subjective feedback 
The steps for the Vista bootpartition-move, using Acronis True Image, should be these:
- Boot from the Acronis True Image CD
- Backup your boot partition from the old drive
- Restore the backup to the new drive, mark the new partition active (Cloning didn’t work, because the SSD is much smaller, and the UI doesn’t let me clone just one partition)
- Reboot from your Vista Installation disc
- Repair the installation on your new drive (the log should show something about “missing bootmanager – fixed”)
- Boot from your new SSD
- If your bootpartition is not C, fix it this way: How to restore the system/boot drive letter in Windows
- Done. Finished. Hopefully.. (At least, you should have 2 layers of backups to restart if something screws up…)
Just two small things OCZ could improve:
- Inform me as a customer, that there is no SATA cable in the retail box. Every other retail (SATA) harddrive I bought up to this day had at least one packed.
- As most of the customers will be “switchers” imho, ship something to help with the partition migration process. I will happily pay some more bucks, if it just works.
Since the first time I have seen Balsamiq Mockups, it rocked my world. It is now a pleasure to create mockups. With Mockups, this is a fast and intuitive process, for everyone. Yes, I like this tool as a developer, and I am sure that any non-developer will also like it as much!
There are a lot of shapes one can choose like a browser window, iphone window, any other window, webcontrols, etc. The result can be exported as PNG or saved as XML. With XML files one can even diff/merge mockups
Short overview:
- Create software mockups in minutes
- Collaborate with your team
- Focus on creating your product
The guy/company behind Mockups, Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni, is even more impressive. There is a very good interview over at 37 signals (see Sources):
“I never really understood the concept of building a company with the goal to sell it, or why one should have an ‘exit strategy.’ I just don’t get it. If you’re doing what you love, why would you want to ‘exit’? Maybe it’s because I am Italian, but I see nothing wrong with a business staying small in the long run. As long as we do great work, are happy to do it, and make people happy with it, I see no reason to change anything.”
Thank you again for the kind response to my email, Balsamiq Team, and the chance to review this very nice (and therefore rare) piece of software.
Sources:
Just as a short notice, I moved my feed to feedburner. The new feed url is this: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/logaholic
I did this to “outsource” my feed traffic and improve statistics for analyzing what you like to read
Yes, I also moved the subscribe button/links to a more prominent position (top right, larger icon).
Update: Automagic redirection in place. You shouldn’t need to update anything
Note: If you don’t want to or cannot by company-rule trust Amazon S3, this is probably not what you want to read.
I’m going to show you how one could improve the security of his production environment backups. In this setup the production environment can never harm any old backup. There is another offsite backup location if Amazon S3 should fail – for us being our office, this is also perfect for up-to-date testing/development database snapshots.
We will need two separate Amazon S3 accounts and any s3 console tool (like s3bash).
The production environment, with its own (restricted to put and get files) s3 user, will push backups to our s3 bucket. It is not allowed to delete backups there. It does not have any access to the offsite location. If someone gets access to our production environment, he can not delete our backups on s3 per their acl, and can never harm our offsite backups. This is kind of an one-way solution and represents the “push-strategy“.
The offsite location, with the second, full privileged s3 account, will pull the backups from s3 every night. There are also tools for backup verification and testing-environment updates. This is the “pull-strategy“. The offsite location has access to the production environment for maintenance task and deployment.
Small graphic:
I wanted to mention this setup since i read a blogpost about a worst case scenario:
“A huge flight sim site was hacked and destroyed this weekend – avsim.com. An important lesson on why off-site backups are critical! They had two servers, and had a backup of A on B, and B on A. Both were taken out.”
Downsides:
- Access to our office network/offsite backups would be bad.
- Bruteforcing/getting access to our administrative S3 Account would be bad.
- you have to trust Amazon with your data
Conclusion:
Always combine different backup strategies and test your backups. One day you will need them!
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