As a part of this, we are disabling 777 access to any website. To accomplish this, we are migrating our servers to SuPHP to secure our PHP and apache configurations. This move will make sure files cannot be written by everyone and will prevent the issue caused by the 777 permissions that were previously allowed on all files.

We are implementing this change in our shared servers on 30-Oct-2010.
suPHP is a tool for executing PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners. With this we have following advantages in shared hosting environment

No folders or files can have 777 permission and it cannot be owned by user “nobody”. This is one of the greatest advantage where we can secure the files and folders in the site as none can do anything other than the site owners.

This change will go in at midnight on 29-Oct-2010 and as of 30-Oct-2010 we will not allow any 777 access on any of our servers.

Site Owner should make following in their site
1. Make sure no 777 permission files or folders/directories present in the site. The recommendation is to change it to 755 for folders and 644 for files.
2. .htaccess file should not contain any php_value. Please move those values under php.ini file instead.

Please feel free to contact us if you need any help with this.

Resellers please pass this is to the respective site owners.

We have successfully upgraded our wordpressmu from 2.9.2 to 3.0.1

Here are the steps we followed for this upgradation

http://wpmu.org/how-to-upgrade-wpmu-2-9-2-to-wordpress-3-0-in-5-easy-steps/

We have also upgraded all our plugins and we are happy to say that we are in WordPress-3 club.

Have fun!!

In version 1.3.1, we faced the following error when we checkout using paypal
“There was an error proccessing your request”

We did many studies to fix this and we finally we decided to upgrade the magento to the latest version as we thought this might fix the issue. Since we developed the skin(theme) for the site, we knew it should be done with great care as we need to merge our custom code with magento code.

As always, before upgrading the live site, we upgraded the testing site with many trial and errors and atlast we did it successfully in testing. We have the steps noted down below which we took while upgrading the production site. Below are the steps which we like to share

1. Backup both files and database in production before starting your upgradation
2. Now, just delete the files alone.
3. Download the latest magento verion from here
4. Restore the files in your desired location. For example., /home/yoursite/public_html/
5. Now, install the magento thru browser http://www.yousitename.com/
6. When installing, when it prompts for database username and password, give the existing database details(which has your data), please don’t create new database.
7. Give all the required details while installation and complete the installation with successful
8. Once, you are done with the installation, you can open admintool without any errors but frontend will show errors.
9. Rename or remove the media folder and copy the media folder from your backup as it contains images of all your products.
10. Error log will be in the following location /home/yoursite/public_html/var/log/system.log
Once you open error log, you can notice following error

2010-09-01T12:28:47+00:00 ERR (3): Strict Notice: Only variables should be passed by reference in /home/yoursite/public_html/lib/Zend/Db/Select.php on line 246

To fix the above error, please open the mentioned file /home/yoursite/public_html/lib/Zend/Db/Select.php on line 246
Comment the following line
$correlationName = current(array_keys($this->_parts[self::FROM]));

Replace it with the following 2 lines

$arrayKeys = array_keys($this->_parts[self::FROM]);
$correlationName = current($arrayKeys);

11. Copy the folders from your files backup of layout and template in app/design/frontend/default/default to /home/yoursite/public_html/app/design/frontend/default/default/

12. Delete the folder “base” in app/design/frontend if you store your theme in default folder.

13. Copy the following folders from skin folder in backup in following location skin/frontend/default/default
to /home/yoursite/public_html/skin/frontend/default/default
css, images and js (if you have)

14. Open the following file app/design/frontend/default/default/layout/page.xml
find the following line

and replace it with

15. Now, if you browse the site, you can see the following error in /home/yoursite/public_html/var/log/system.log
2010-09-01T13:13:08+00:00 ERR (3): Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/weavezc/public_html/app/design/frontend/ default/default/template/catalog/product/list/toolbar.phtml on line 51

/public_html/app/code/core/Mage/ Catalog/Block/Product/List/Toolbar.php

To fix this,
find
class Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List_Toolbar extends Mage_Core_Block_Template
replace it with
class Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List_Toolbar extends Mage_Page_Block_Html_Pager

That’s all.. we did and we the magento site with our themes is working good without any issues. You can check it out here: Weavez Website Using Magento

Please comment here if you need to tell us something..

Once we copied the files and database to the new server, it started showing has the following errors

Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/sitename/public_htm/wp-settings.php line xx

This error should be fixed by removing “&” in wp-settings.php where you have assigned a variable

For example, I have given below one assignment statement

$GLOBALS['wp_query'] =& new WP_Query();

Remove ‘&’ and make the line look like below

$GLOBALS['wp_query'] = new WP_Query();

Similarly remove “&” in all places whereever this error is thrown.

One more thing is function “set_magic_quotes_runtime()” in deprecated in php-5.3.2
Instead we should use the following
ini_set(“magic_quotes_runtime”, 0);

Also, the function split() is deprecated in php-5.3.2. Instead we should use explode ()

I had already posted a week back other functions that are deprecated in PHP-5.3.2.

Today I found other 3 functions. I will keep posting my updates whenever I find the old functions deprecated in PHP-5.3.2

This blog explains the steps to install Knowledge Tree on a Cent OS server.

We were asked to install a Knowledge Management System called Knowledge Tree for one of our shared hosting clients, whose website is hosted in Centos 5.5 server.
Once we got this requirement I went through knowledgetree web site and I found that they do not provide the documentation for the installation in Centos server but they support RedHat Linux 5 and it is clearly explained in their Platform Requirements page.  So I decided to try it out on my own and once got it installed successfully, am sharing the steps with you.

I downloaded the community edition from their Knowledge Tree Community downloads page using the install from source code option.

Here is the installation steps I did

1. After downloading, untar the compressed file and open the folder through browser (i.e., http://yoursite.com/knowledgetree/) which goes through a series of steps for installation. These steps are very straight forward like checking installation requirements, database username and password etc..,

2. Once I completed the installation without any errors, I got the following error when I opened the installed knowledgetree site using a web browser
i.e., http://yoursitename.com/knowledgetree/

Fatal error: Cannot use object of type DB_Error as array in /var/www/knowledgeTree/lib/session/Session.inc on line 252

This error is because that there is no contents in the database which should have been created by the Knowledge Tree installation process during installation. I don’t know why this was not done automatically when we installed even though we provide database username and password.

In any case, I went to the  knowledgetree/sql/mysql/install/ folder and found the data.sql and structure.sql files. I downloaded both the files and imported structure.sql and then data.sql

3. Now, when I checked the site http://yoursite.com/knowledgetree/

I got a new error

Fatal error: Call to a member function getPath() on a non-object in /var/www/knowledgeTree/lib/plugins/pluginutil.inc.php on line 597

This error can be fixed by truncating the two tables in database. I truncated them using phpmyadmin and opened the database and ran the following two SQL statements.

truncate plugins;
truncate plugin_helper;

4. Now, I got the following error when I accessed the site http://yoursite.com/knowledgetree/

[db_error: message="DB Error: connect failed" code=-24 mode=return level=notice prefix="" info="Array"]

I fixed it by verifying the database credentials in /var/www/knowledgeTree/config/config.ini

dbHost = localhost
dbName = database name
dbUser = database username
dbPass = database password
dbPort = 3306

dbAdminUser = database username
dbAdminPass = database password

Please remember to change “dbAdminUser” and “dbAdminPass” which I forgot earlier.

Thus completed by installation after my tough fight with it, but at the end it worth it as it took care of the client’s need.

Hope someone will find this information useful if you are looking to install Knowledge Tree on Cent OS.

I tried increasing Mail quota from 50 MB to 100 MB thru cpanel but we got the following error “Error – invalid maildirsize file”

After investigation we found a solution for this.

We took the following steps to fix this:

1. Login to your server via FTP
2. Navigate to the following path /mail/yourdomain.com/user

Substitute yourdomain.com/username with the correct email domain/user. E.G. user@yourdomain.com

3. From this directory, delete the file named maildirsize
4. Once this file is deleted, the system should reform the mail account automatically with the correct mailbox quota size upon new email activity.

Notes: If the correct mailbox quota is still not being displayed, from within cPanel, you can navigate to email accounts and click the change quota button to set a new quota.

Hope this information will be useful to all.

We are using a search engine called Search Plugin .  This search engine uses PHP code that was working well on its old server which had PHP 5.1 on it.

Recently, we migrated Search Plugin to one of our semi-dedicated server for enhancing its usability. After we migrated to this server, we faced the following error.

Deprecated: Function eregi_replace() is deprecated in /home/searchpl/public_html/include/searchfuncs.php on line 582

We came to knew recently that the in-built function mentioned in the error eregi_replace() is deprecated (or removed) in PHP 5.3.2. The recommendation from PHP is to use the alternate function preg_match.

Please see the sample code below

Old version: $a = strtolower(eregi_replace(“[ ]+”, ” “, $a));
New version: $a = strtolower(preg_replace(“/[ ]+/”, ” “, $a));

Please note that in preg_replace, the first argument should be placed between  “/” tags.

If you use “eregi” then the equivalent replacement will be “preg_match”
Sample code is

old version: while (eregi(“([-]?)\”([^\"]+)\”", $a, $regs)) {
New version: while (preg_match(“/([-]?)\”([^\"]+)/”, $a, $regs)) {

This replacements solved our function deprecated issue. I thought of sharing this with everyone. Since I am not a experienced developer, I am learning about the arguments in the function preg_replace and preg_match and also, the use of “/” in the first argument.

I will post my next updates after my learning, If any knows please comment here.

Thanks for reading this..

Aravind has been with Auro Infotech for five years now and has grown from the role of a Server Administrator to Manager of the Server Support Team.

In this role, he has gone above and beyond his basic job responsibilities and has contributed to various initiatives at Auro Infotech.

In 2009, Aravind was instrumental in leading the efforts in engineering various solutions such as WordPress MU, Magento, OpenX, etc. He has also been managing various client initiatives in different projects we delivered to our clients.

As a result, in 2010, Aravind is now also overseeing the design team and is on track to managing the operations of Auro Infotech, Chennai.

As a part of this reward, Aravind gets a special gift of his choice from the Auro Infotech Management team. I hope he will write about his gift in the near future.

Please join me in congratulating Aravind on a job well done and wish him all the best in all his future initiatives.

The requirement was as follows:

Currently we manage a set of wordpress blogs each with its own installation on its own servers. Some blogs were the main site for the respective domains and some blogs were wordpress installations in sub folders in the respective domains. This was becoming a maintenance nightmare, as with each version upgrade of wordpress, we had to upgrade ten different local installations of the same.

Our task was to eliminate the need for maintaining multiple wordpress installations and have a single installation that will be used to manage multiple blogs, one sub domain per blog. Also, we had to come up with a way to get a blog up and running with minimum effort for any new client/guest asking for a new blog for themselves.

We managed to accomplish the goals successfully today and have centrally implemented the wordpress MU blogging tool on Blogs Plugin – http://blogsplug.in/

There are multiple blogs running out of it. Infact, this blog on Auro Infotech is also now running out of this blogsplug.in WordPress MU installation.

One another key requirement was to make sure that for the existing wordpress sites that are getting converted into this WordPress MU system, the historic indexes in search engines should be retained.

If you search for ‘network solutions domain auro infotech blogs’ on Google it will show the old link:
auroinfotech.com/blogs/blog/…/ns-rebranding-by-network-solutions-are-they-stretching-it/ -

When clicking that link, you will be taken to this page:

http://blogs.auroinfotech.com/2009/08/04/ns-rebranding-by-network-solutions-are-they-stretching-it/

While the old link indexed in google belongs to the WP installation that was there earlier on our blog at auroinfotech.com/blogs, clicking it in the search result correctly takes you to the WPMU installation in blogs.auroinfotech.com .

With this experience, we are ready to take on WPMU installation related tasks as we have learnt quite a few things from this project.

Congratulations to Aravind and Ranjith from the server management team at Auro Infotech for making this happen.

Im Aravind. Im with AuroInfotech for the past 4 years.

Here is my brief introduction:

Im born and brought-up in Chennai. I did my school life in “New Prince Mat. Hr. Sec. School”, Madipakkam, Chennai.   I am a PG graduate with M.Sc – specialization in Information Technology.  I did my Integrated PG course for 5 years at Periyar University, Salem.  I completed my Course in 2004 and started my career in CMS technologies as Junior System Administrator.  Then, in June 2005, I got the offer in AuroInfotech and I have been here till date.

As an employee of AuroInfotech (AI), I had to say about the work culture here.  In AI, we have a challenging environment. I still remember my day1 tasks at AuroInfotech. I was committed to install a open source tool “FFmpeg” in my local server. (FYI, till that date I haven’t heard of that word FFmpeg). I was feared but I challenged it myself and later on day2, I was successful in installation. About 4 years back, remember that there is not even enough documentation for FFmpeg. My commitment made it a successful one.

I had worked on many such challenging tasks and I made it successful many times.  So, AuroInfotech is the place where we can have many such challenging tasks and everyone here is committed to achieve the end goal. Many of my team members like Kandan, who has become expert in Magento design, Anitha-worked in Zencart customization, Mugunthan, Ranjith, Mukesh etc.. each one proved their specialization in different areas. Remember, they all learned and became experts in AI in a short span of time.

So, Employment in AuroInfotech, needs people who dedicate their work towards a challenging task. This is what my Administrator, Syed Hussain says. We are not recruiting experts but we recruit individuals who like to become experts.

Im going to write blogs here frequently with all technical Issues/questions we face here in AI and the steps taken to solve it. I guess this will certainly help others, also let others know what we are doing at AI.

That’s all for now