All in a day’s work…. (magento and putty)

Here’s a random summary of some vaguely interesting techie things today.

Magento Migration

When exporting a Magento website from a third party (e.g 1&1), you’ll need to :

1. Copy all files across; the ‘var’ directory can probably be omitted as it’s full of cache like stuff. ‘media’ and ‘var’ look like they need to be writeable by the web server.
2. Edit the app/etc/local.xml file to specify the new database settings
3. Check the various .htaccess files; the one in the root directory will probably need tweaking.
4. Dump the database, and ensure that it has the following at the top of the dump file before restoring on the new host:

• SET NAMES “utf8”
• SET SQL_MODE=”NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO”

Failure to do the ‘utf8’ one, will lead to £ symbols being slightly wrong.

Failure to do the second will ensure that all the foreign key references fail (so restoration will be hard to start with) and if you disable the foreign key checks (‘SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;’) you’ll find that Magento will b0rk on access – complaining about nulls and so on in parts of the configuration (the error message will likely mention app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Mysql4/Config.php ).

All of the above is ignoring the fact that the Magento instance I migrated was infested with some malware, and I’m not yet sure how it ‘got there’, though I shot an email over to my buddy at Bing (Bing Digital is a leading Magento agency run by my buddy of 15 years). However, when it does next get infected, which it is likely to, I will at least be able to see what’s changed thanks to git.

Putty on OSX

Well, it sort of exists; if you use ‘brew‘ – namely ‘brew install putty’ does something – but doesn’t (yet? can it?) build the GUI. However, all I needed was to convert a putty ssh keyfile (blahblah.putty.key) into an openssh variant, for which puttygen works perfectly :

• puttygen blahblah.putty.key -O private-openssh -o test.key

Strangely there don’t seem to be any free apps on the app-store for SSH. I’m almost surprised no one hasn’t just compiled putty and put it on there for 50p or free.