Tag Archive for 'apache'

Moving a WordPress blog to another domain

Published 5 months, 3 weeks ago. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

qpx-site-domain-migration I provide hosting for free to some of my friends. One of them, QPX, had a side project called Lich’ti. But the latter is no longer active, so he decided to not renew the lich-ti.fr domain.

If Lich’ti’s domain name is dead, QPX’s personal blog is not. His website is powered by WordPress and was available at http://qpx.lich-ti.fr. My job is now to move it to http://qpx.coolcavemen.com. In this post, I’ll tell you how I’ve done it.

Before going further, backup everything, and be ready to revert back to your original situation at any moment ! What works for me will not necessary works for you…

To play nice with your visitors, you can setup a temporary maintenance page while we’re performing the migration.

Let’s start the migration by replacing, in the files served by Apache, all occurrences of the old domain name by the new one:

find /var/www/qpx-blog -mount -print -type f -exec sed -i 's/qpx.lich-ti.fr/qpx.coolcavemen.com/g' "{}" \;

If you have doubts about the efficiency of the command above, you can check the presence of the string we’re looking to replace via this command:

grep -RIi "qpx.lich-ti.fr" ./*

Then, we dump the database containing all WordPress content and config to a local file (the command will prompt for password):

mysqldump -p --host=localhost --port=3306 --user=root --opt --databases "qpx_blog" > qpx_dump.sql

And we replace all strings of the old domain by the new one:

sed 's/qpx.lich-ti.fr/qpx.coolcavemen.com/g' qpx_dump.sql > new_qpx.sql

Finally, we re-inject the modified database content after clearing the original:

mysql -p --host=localhost --port=3306 --user=root --execute='DROP DATABASE `qpx_blog`;'
mysql -p --host=localhost --port=3306 --user=root < new_qpx.sql

Now you can disable the maintenance page and test the blog to check nothing’s broken.

Again, to play nice with your visitors (and search engines), you can redirect old URLs to the new domain, with apache directives similar to this one:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName qpx.lich-ti.fr
  RedirectMatch permanent (.*) http://qpx.coolcavemen.com$1
</VirtualHost>

eAccelerator for PHP5 on Debian Lenny

Published 6 months, 3 weeks ago. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

eAccelerator is an open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache (to quote the official website of the project). It can effectively speed-up PHP processing on a server by caching bytecode.

As Wikipedia tells you, several tools of this kind exists. Why choosing eAccelerator in particular ? I really have no clue… I’ve never used any of these tools, so I had to start somewhere. That’s as simple as that !

Now, I have a Debian server as a target system. Unfortunately, eAccelerator is not bundled in Lenny. Browsing the web, I found some personal repositories of people kindly sharing their deb packages, like Andrew McMillan and schnuckelig.eu. The former provides a version of eAccelerator for the i386, the latter for the amd64 architecture. In this how-to, I’ve combined the 2 repositories to give both 32 bits and 64 bits users a chance to use eAccelerator on Lenny.

Let’s start the installation ! First, add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://debian.mcmillan.net.nz/debian lenny awm
deb-src http://debian.mcmillan.net.nz/debian lenny awm
deb http://debian.schnuckelig.eu/ lenny main contrib non-free

To kill annoying warning messages, register the cryptographic fingerprint of each repository:

$ gpg --keyserver keyring.debian.org --recv-keys 0x8f068012;
$ gpg --export --armor 0x8f068012 | apt-key add -
$ wget -O - http://debian.schnuckelig.eu/repository-key.gpg | apt-key add -

Then, update your package database:

$ aptitude update

And finally, you can install eAccelerator for PHP5 without any pain:

$ apt-get install php5-eaccelerator

Happy fine-tunning !

Wordpress 2.2 Security Hole: Identity Theft

Published 2 years, 9 months ago. 11 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

I’m running 4 Wordpress blogs, for me and my friends. All of them are updated to latest version of Wordpress as soon as a new one is available.

One of them, Maomium, was hacked last night. Someone created a user account on it then stole my admin identity to post content. As soon as I discovered the hack, I’ve put the blog down and changed all passwords which may have been exposed to the hacker (database, etc…).

Before the hack happened, my apache log show me that a person was looking for blogs powered by Wordpress 2.2 and open to registration:

123.76-136-217.adsl-dyn.isp.belgacom.be www.maomium.com - [07/Jun/2007:00:51:55 +0200] "GET /category/wordpress/ HTTP/1.1" 200 2960 "http://www.google.be/search?hl=fr&q=%22powered+by+wordpress+2.2%22+Register&btnG=Rechercher&meta=" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4"

This person was my hacker. As you can see he’s a belgian guy and his broadband provider is Belgacom, to which I sent an abuse request. He register himself as Waryas with his myv4you@hotmail.com email. I know that, thanks to the email Wordpress send me each time someone register. Then google told me that this hack was not his first.

If you want to disect his behaviour, you can download my apache log.

This event show us that the Wordpress vulnerablility regarding guest account registration is still there. So the advice given by CountZero must be applied !

FeedBurner and e107 integration

Published 2 years, 9 months ago. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

FeedBurner and e107 integration

In the context of my plan to move an e107-based website to Wordpress, I need to take care of my RSS subscribers. To let people (and search engines) get my content via old URLs, I will use Apache redirections to do this transparently and permanently. My final goal is to have a Wordpress website with all RSS feeds (blog posts and comments) managed by FeedBurner, to gather statistics about my audience.

Actually there is plenty of feeds format available in e107 (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom and RDF) and one feed can be accessed through multiple URLs. We will reduce this incredible mess by using RSS 2.0 feeds only and redirect all others to it.

First, check that the e107 RSS feed plugin is activated. Then create an account on FeedBurner and setup there two feeds, one for your website’s news and another one for comments. Based on default e107 parameters, your news feed URL is like http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?1.2 and comments feed like http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?5.2.

Then, create (or edit) the http://www.my-domain.com/.htaccess file, and add following code:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(5|Comments)
RewriteRule e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss\.php http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed-comments? [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(1|News|.*)
RewriteRule e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss\.php http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed? [R=301,L]

This code is inspired by the one written by Mike Atlas, who had a similar issue and wanted to outsource his e107 forum RSS feeds to FeedBurner.

The first rewrite rule will redirect all URLs that start with http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?5 or http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?Comments to http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed-comments.

The second rewrite rule will redirect all other URLs that start with http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php (including http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?1 and http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?News) to http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed.

That’s all ! Thanks to this server-side redirection, nobody will notice that the feeds have moved and no subscriber will be bothered to update their aggregator.

In my case, the only remaining task to do is to move my e107 website to Wordpress then install FeedSmith plugin. But that’s another story… ;)

Repository Moved thanks to Apache and 301 Redirections

Published 3 years ago. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Since the creation of my personal Mandriva repository (10 months ago) the number of my RPMs did not cease to increase. Currently all RPMs and SRPMs from 2006.0 and 2007.0 take 383MiB of space.

So I decided to move the http://kevin.deldycke.com/static/repository folder to http://kevin.deldycke.free.fr/repository, which is a 10GiB (yes, ten gibibyte, this is not a typo) free web space offered by Free, my ISP.

To do this smoothly, I’ve just set up a generic 301 redirection thanks to Apache. This is the only line I added to my root .htaccess file to enable this:

Redirect permanent /static/repository http://kevin.deldycke.free.fr/repository

This move will normally be completely silent for you. So please, let me now if something bad happend while you play with my repository.