thought I'd take a break from coding and post about how open-source is such a great tool for finding the best answers to the toughest questions,
/** is the status code informational */
#define ap_is_HTTP_INFO(x) (((x) >= 100)&&((x) < 200))
/** is the status code OK ?*/
#define ap_is_HTTP_SUCCESS(x) (((x) >= 200)&&((x) < 300))
/** is the status code a redirect */
#define ap_is_HTTP_REDIRECT(x) (((x) >= 300)&&((x) < 400))
/** is the status code a error (client or server) */
#define ap_is_HTTP_ERROR(x) (((x) >= 400)&&((x) < 600))
/** is the status code a client error */
#define ap_is_HTTP_CLIENT_ERROR(x) (((x) >= 400)&&((x) < 500))
/** is the status code a server error */
#define ap_is_HTTP_SERVER_ERROR(x) (((x) >= 500)&&((x) < 600))
/** is the status code a (potentially) valid response code? */
#define ap_is_HTTP_VALID_RESPONSE(x) (((x) >= 100)&&((x) < 600))
Hacking
2 awesome ways to implement caching on your website using Apache .htaccess or httpd.conf. Both methods are extremely simple to set up and will dramatically speed up your site! Htaccess Cache Cache-Control ETag Expires Header Headers Htaccess mod_expires mod_headers
Stop wasting your lives with Mac Terminals.. or Macs. Get a real machine and then get a real shell multiplexer! For many years we all loved GNU Screen, but tmux is by far a better option today. The only time I am in the shell and not using a multiplexer, is when I'm not on one of my machines. My Arch Linux machines all run URxvt and my .bash_profiles all start tmux automataically, whether in X or single-user mode, tmux is where it's at.
Hacking, Linux linux.bash Screen shell tmux
Apache, Hosting 2.4 Apache Error
PHP's fsockopen function lets you open an Internet or Unix domain socket connection for connecting to a resource, and is one of the most powerful functions available in the php language.
PHP fsockopen PHP socket strace udp Unix
Hacking, Net, PHP cURL Error PHP
If for some reason you need to use windows .bat batch file scripting to do some task, or you just want to learn the most universal batch programming language on Windows machines, you lucked out and found the AskApache example. My expertise is the shell, in this article the shell is Windows cmd.exe. It has some pretty advanced windows shell usage, including pipes and redirection, but it's the modular linux-like coding approach that earns this script it's "advanced" title.
:SETPROMPT
set PROMPT=$_[%USERNAME%@%USERDOMAIN%]$S[$P]$_$M$G && EXIT /B
My favorite tool (and I've tried sooo many) for editing most Windows files and especially .bat files is the free and open-source Notepad++. Set that up and you will have a color-syntax-highlighted editor for Batch Scripting that works very very well.
Windows Batch File Batch Scripting Command Prompt Microsoft Windows
An image and technicacl achievement so profound, it will touch yoour heart.. So 3D... it'll hurt you eyes! LOL.. lol.. Man I am cracking up here. haha Ha definately the best intro ever, those really do look 3D for terminal though huh.. Sweet. Here is the little function I wrote to output that grey marble.
Linux ANSI escape code ANSI.SYS Control characters Escape sequence Stty Termcap Terminfo Tput
Unix file permissions are one of the more difficult subjects to grasp.. Well, ok maybe "grasp" isn't the word.. Master is the right word.. Unix file permissions is a hard topic to fully master, mainly I think because there aren't many instances when a computer user encounters them seriously, and bitwise is oldschool. This contains a listing of all possible permission masks and bits from a linux, php, and web hosting view.... cuz you guys AskApache Regs Rock!
Security chmod File Permissions umask
While researching a unix/linux tool awk I came upon one of the most thorough and helpful tutorials I've ever seen devoted to a particular topic. It's old-school just the way I like it. I contacted the author, Bruce Barnett because I just HAD to have this article for my readers, who are predominantly running solaris/unix/bsd/linux and he kindly gave permission.
Linux
What they say about kung-fu is true..
It can be attained by anyone through hard work over time. You can become as good as the amount of work you put in. Here's a short look at a basic technique that I use. Simply reverse engineering the source code and taking notes along the way...
static void php_session_send_cookie(TSRMLS_D)
if (SG(headers_sent)) {
if (output_start_filename) {
php_error_docref(NULL TSRMLS_CC, E_WARNING, "Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent by (output started at %s:%d)",
output_start_filename, output_start_lineno);
} else {
php_error_docref(NULL TSRMLS_CC, E_WARNING, "Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent");
}
return;
}
/* URL encode session_name and id because they might be user supplied */
e_session_name = php_url_encode(PS(session_name), strlen(PS(session_name)), NULL); PHP PHP Session Session ID
Javascript
The story behind this plugin is sorta wack, but in a good way :). While doing tons of security research on permissions, authorization, access, etc.. for the Password Protection plugin (still being worked on), I needed to have unheard of debugging capabilities while working on the plugin on the various websites, webhosts, and test servers that I use to test in different environments. So I hacked together a bunch of php code that helped me debug, actually I pretty much went overkill and tried to get as much debugging info as programmatically possible, and it ended up being so much code that I took it out of my Password Protection code and made it its own plugin.
WordPress
Using FastCGI on DreamHost and .htaccess
Shell Scripting
Recently I had to setup a script to curl 10k urls, but it could only do 500 requests at any one time. In order to work under that limit, I created a function that returns the number of currently running processes on the machine in an extremely fast and efficient way, thus allowing the curl_multi requests to queu themselves such as GNU xargs.
PHP /proc clearstatcache Hard link PHP Process stat version_compare
FallBackResource is a great alternative to using mod_rewrite to direct Apache to send all requests for non-existing files/directories to a script in WordPress. Htaccess and Server Config enabled.
Apache, httpd 2.4 FallbackResource Htaccess mod_dir mod_rewrite RewriteBase RewriteRule wordpress
Play a tune directly on your pcspeaker right before the grub boot manager loads.
Linux GRUB GRUB_INIT_TUNE grub.cfg speaker
There are a total of 57 HTTP Status Codes recognized by the Apache Web Server. Wouldn't you like to see what all those headers and their output, ErrorDocuments look like?
Htaccess 403 404 500 503 Htaccess mod_rewrite PHP RewriteCond RewriteRule
The bottom line for this article is that I want to make WordPress as fast, secure, and easy to install, run, and manage because I am using it more and more for client production sites, I will work for days in order to solve an issue so that I never have to spend time on that issue again. Time is money in this industry and that is ultimately (time) what there is to gain by tweaking WordPress.
Note: I spent no time on readability, this is primarily a read the code and figure it out article.. This is for advanced users looking for a reference or discussion and for those of you looking to advance. Feedback would be great if you make it that far..
WordPress wordpress wp-config.php
Find and Replace tool in Adobe DreamWeaver is useful of course, but you aren't using a fraction of the power until you use REGEX.
Software
Here's an example of validation links from the AskApache footer.
RSS | XHTML 1.1 | CSS 2.1
document.getElementById("validat").innerHTML += ' | <a href="http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=https://www.askapache.com/feed/">RSS</a> | <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check/referer?ss=1;outline=1;sp=1;debug">XHTML 1.1</a> | <a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer?warning=0">CSS 2.1</a>'; Javascript Firebug JavaScript
If you examine the preferences dialog of any modern Web browser (like Internet Explorer, Safari or Mozilla), you'll probably notice a 'cache' setting. This lets you set aside a section of your computer's hard disk to store representations that you've seen, just for you. The browser cache works according to fairly simple rules. It will check to make sure that the representations are fresh, usually once a session (that is, the once in the current invocation of the browser).
Optimization
While reading up on gethostbyaddr on PHP.net, I saw a nice idea for using fsockopen to connect over UDP port 53 to any Public DNS server, like Google DNS 8.8.8.8, and sending the reverse addr lookup in oh about 100 bytes, then getting the response in oh about 150 bytes! All in less than a second. This is how/why to read/write data directly to the wire! This would be extremely valuable for use in things like my online header tool because it's faster than any other method. As usual, I went a bit overboard optimizing it to be lean and fast.
PHP DNS fsockopen gethostbyaddr Google networking OpenDNS PHP socket udp UltraDNS
This is a big update from the last time I looked into this, when I enumerated 57 Status Codes that Apache 2.x was capable of handling. This list contains 83 Status Codes recognized by Apache. I compiled the latest 2.4.4 Apache in order to view the actual codes sent by a live server.. very cool. You can read about the newest HTTP Status Codes in RFC 6585.
Net Apache cURL ErrorDocument Htaccess HTTP HTTP Headers Redirect Status Code
If you have a php.cgi or php.ini file in your /cgi-bin/ directory or other pub directory, try requesting them from your web browser. If your php.ini shows up or worse you are able to execute your php cgi, you'll need to secure it ASAP. This shows several ways to secure these files, and other interpreters like perl, fastCGI, bash, csh, etc.
Htaccess Apache HTTP Server CGI Common Gateway Interface Htaccess HTTP 403 interpreter PHP php interpreter php.ini security SuEXEC
Wanted to stick this here for a reference, mostly for me. I use ASCII alot in bash, preg_matches, preg_replace, etc..
Linux ASCII Unicode
PHP
FYI, using the Mod_Rewrite Variables Cheatsheet makes this example, and all advanced .htaccess code easier to understand. This demo lets you set a cookie with 1 of 3 values, then you just request the pdf file with a normal link click and get 1 of 3 different responses. This is accomplished with a nice bit of .htaccess code.
Htaccess Htaccess HTTP cookie JavaScript PDF pdf.js Portable Document Format
How To remove the /category/ from WordPress category urls.
James
We're using WP as a CMS with pages and posts. Done a bit of customization, so it looks sweet. Problem - i have some child categories that throw 404 when the category redirect is in place. How did you remove the category base from the url structure in wordpress?
WordPress
Search all files in a directory, replacing all occurances of string with a replacement string.
Shell Scripting
Hacking Cheat sheet linux
Ultimate Redirect Cheatsheet for multiple programming languages. Redirecting Users with Javascript redirect, meta refresh redirect, and php redirect, also htaccess methods, python, coldfusion, asp, perl, etc.
Htaccess 301 Htaccess Redirect URL redirection
This explains the basic methods to get started caching with php headers
Optimization
Wouldn't it be great if you could use php and curl to download multiple files simultaneously using built-in curl functions? You can!
PHP
Very nice tutorial dealing with the robots.txt file. Shows examples for google and other search engines. Wordpress robots.txt and phpBB robots.txt sample files. SEO
Just a very brief look at speeding up form submission by delegating the processing and bandwidth to your server, not your client.
PHP bottleneck cURL form fsockopen PHP snoopy
The secrets in this post were really more of enlightening bits of seo wisdom. The secret is how to combine robots.txt with meta robots tags to control pagerank, juice, whatever.
SEO
This is awesome. I was so fed up with trying to find a fail-proof, cross-platform way to find the mime type of an image using PHP that I wrote a quick function that utilizes the same technology as the exif_imagetype, getimagesize, and finfo functions do. Ahh the joys of low-level.
PHP file filetype images mime mimetype
While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage.
Hacking
