Extremely Slow Wifi Speeds After Installing Ubuntu

November 17, 2011 Category :Linux 0

The other day I decided to install Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot nativly on my Dell Studio 1737 laptop. Everything went great except for one thing. When it came time to connect to the Internet or any network resource for that matter I was reminded of the days of dial up in that things were VERY slow. The problem seems to be with the iwlagn module produced by the iwlwifi Linux kernel driver which supports several Intel wireless LAN adapters. There would seem to be a bug in it causing a huge speed decrease when conneted to a 802.11n network. The only solutions I found was to do one of the following things: » Continue Reading

Setting up XDebug to Debug PHP Applications

September 26, 2011 Category :Web Development 0

The following are general instructions as to how to set up XDebug and should work for most any environment you may be using whether it is Apache or IIS. You will want to make sure before continuing that you have a web server installed and running on which to do your PHP debugging using XDebug.

First you will need to download the latest version of XDebug from http://xdebug.org/download.php for the type of system your web server is running on. » Continue Reading

Setting Up XDebug under Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 7

September 24, 2011 Category :Web Development 0

This post covers the set up of XDebug for use in debuging PHP using IIS 7 with PHP installed using FastCGI. This post does not cover the installation and configuration of IIS 7 and PHP only what to do to enable XDebug in this environment. If you have not yet installed Microsoft Internet Information Services(IIS) 7 or have yet to set up PHP on IIS 7 you may wish to check out the post I made earlier entitled “Setting Up IIS 7 and PHP Using FastCGI in a Microsoft Window Environment“. That post will walk you through the entire set up of IIS 7 with support for PHP running using FastCGI. » Continue Reading

Setting Up IIS 7 and PHP Using FastCGI in a Microsoft Window Environment

September 24, 2011 Category :Microsoft Windows 1

Setting up and managing PHP in a Microsoft Windows environment under Internet Information Services 7 or IIS7 is a fairly easy task when using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. The following post will walk you through enabling the IIS 7 windows feature along with FastCGI. Afterwards we will use the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to install PHP and the PHP Manager IIS addin. Once finished you will have IIS 7 running PHP using FastCGI as well as an easy way to enable, disable and add extensions to PHP via an easy to use GUI form within the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. » Continue Reading

Configuring nginx to run Magento

September 12, 2011 Category :Linux 2

The other day I moved a clients existing Magento powered ecommerce site from Apache to nginx. The following is the configuration file I used to run the application under nginx.

The site is running flawlessly using this configuration and the memory drain caused by Magento under Apache seems to be somewhat less then it used to be meaning I am no longer having to restart the Apache httpd service as I had in the past when things got gummed up be the resource hungry application know as Magento. This configuration takes into account you will want to run Magento under both http and https so the first thing you will want to do is make sure SSL support is enabled in your nginx.conf file.
» Continue Reading

Adding the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to Visual Studio

September 9, 2011 Category :Web Development 4

This is an update to a quite older post that used to be on my blog. Looking over Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools I noticed there was still traffic coming in to view the older post and receiving a 404 error instead of the information they were looking for. So I decided to sit down update what I remeber to be a very outdated post going back to the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta days with a more recent up to date version including instruction for manual installation as well as installation using NuGet which wasn’t around for the original post. Anyways enough babling onto the reason you may be here which is how to add the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to both Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2008.

If you are using Visual Studio 2010 the easiest way to install the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is by using NuGet. If you are using Visual Studio 2008 you will need to follow the manual installation instructions further down this post. Of course if you are using Visual Studio 2010 you may also use the manual instructions as well if you wish. » Continue Reading

Login and Password Security Best Practices

July 19, 2011 Category :Security 0

The following is a quick and dirty email I was placed in charge of sending to my current employers customer base. When writing it the email was meant to put as bluntly as possible the consequences of using weak passwords just after having two clients just this week being burnt by using passwords such as “12345″ or “mydaughtersname1″. The following was the email I sent out basically using the fairly simple easy for a layman to understand guidelines found within a great document I would suggest any client of mine or visitor to this site read over released from the NSA for which the link can be located at the end of this post. The following is the email I composed.

As of late the news has been filled with stories of compromised web sites leaking personal data such as email addresses and passwords all over the Internet, some of the data even comes from multibillion dollar corporations such as in recent months Sony. To help protect yourself as well as any data stored on the Internet or locally on your network I have compiled this document regarding password policies mostly put together using the National Security Agency’s (NSA) recommendations on the matter. » Continue Reading

Building Chromium OS

July 2, 2011 Category :Chromium OS 0

The following is an updated version of my step by step guide to building Chromium OS. My last post regarding this topic which I removed recently was written when the source was first released to the public. Since then steps have changed and more options were added. I based this post off the instructions supplied by the Chromium OS web site. It is basically a condenced version of their instructions which can be found at http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-guide.

It is recommended by the Chromium OS team that you use Ubuntu 10.04 when compiling Chromium OS which is the version I used when walking through the build myself. Also for this step by step walkthrough I am also running all commands unless specified starting from my user home directory. » Continue Reading

Configuring nginx to run WordPress

July 1, 2011 Category :Linux 1

This post is about configuring nginx to run wordpress. The actual setup of WordPress remains the same as with any other server so I will not cover that in this post. For instruction on how to setup WordPress I suggest reading the documentation regarding WordPress installation contained within the WordPress Codex at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress.

The main difference between running WordPress on a server such as Apache is how the rewrites work. below is a working configuration which runs WordPress flawlessly using nginx which I use. This nginx site configuration file should reside in your /etc/nginx/sites-available/ folder. Be sure to change the paths within this configuration to reflect your paths to WordPress and log files. Once this configuration file is in place and linked to your sites-enabled folder restart your nginx process and you should be good to go with full support for WordPress’es Permalinks. » Continue Reading

Allowing SFTP access while chrooting the user and denying shell access.

June 28, 2011 Category :Linux 2

In my opinion File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a dated protocol which no administrator in their right mind should ever allow to run on any server they are in charge of administrating. FTP was never a protocol designed to be secure and just as Telnet to access remote servers was replaced long ago so should FTP. I will not go into the many weaknesses of FTP security wise when used over the Internet but I am sure if you are reading this you already understand there is a huge risk allowing such a protocol to run on any of your systems.

There are a few solutions to FTP’s shortcomings when it comes to security such as FTPS and SFTP. In this post I will cover SSH File Transfer Protocol or SFTP. SFTP allows for secure file access, transfer and management over SSH which most Linux servers generally have installed to allow for remote administration.

By default any account with SSH access already has SFTP access as well. The problem with just adding a user and letting them have at it is that by default along with SFTP access users which you only wish to grant file management access also have shell access and may be able to install and run processes you may not wish them to run on your server. The following is a command by command walk through on how to allow users only file management access via SFTP while not allowing them to gain shell access on your server. » Continue Reading

1 / 2 1 2 »