Top 10 Redis Resources Online

Chances are you’ve heard of Memcache. Tons of websites use it to speed up page load times. I often say that Redis is like Memcache on steroids. You may not have heard of Redis, but if you’re using Memcache or APC, you should see how Redis could improve what you’re already doing. If you’re not using Memcache or APC yet, don’t bother – I urge you to take a look at Redis for a bunch of reasons.

First, Memcache is a key-value store only. You set a string value under a string key, and that’s it. With Redis, on the other hand, you have the luxury of several different types of data storage, including keys and values, but Redis also supports hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.

An example to help explain why this is such a huge improvement. Say you have a big array of data, such as the kind that can come back from a web service request, like a parsed XML file or JSON packet. With Memcache, to store this in memory you have to serialize the data, often base64 encode the data, and then store it on the way in, and then to get a portion of the data back out again, you have to get the whole string, base64 decode it, deserialize it and then you can read from it. These extra steps needlessly chew up compute cycles.

With the same data object stored in a Redis Hash, for example, you can have instant access to the data stored in any key of the hash, you don’t have to grab the whole thing, deserialize it and all that mess. Just a single line of code, and boom, there’s your data. Much more elegant.

Another key reason Redis is superior to Memcache is that when you ask Memcache to store something, it’s in memory and that’s it. If your server goes down and you have to reboot, you have to repopulate your Memcache data over again. If your app has gotten huge, and your cache is huge, this can not only take awhile but puts a huge strain on your database server during this so-called “cache warmup” period. Unlike Memcache, Redis actually stores a copy of its data to a file on disk in the background, so if you stop and start your Redis server, it reloads everything automatically. It does this mind-blowingly fast, too, like millions of keys in seconds.

Finally, Redis supports master-slave configurations that you can use to build high-availability systems more easily. In the upcoming release (everyone is very eager for) Redis Cluster will support sharding out of the box!

Top 10 Redis Resources Online

Configure Subversion with Apache and Security in 5 Easy Steps

I’ve been running WampServer for years on my trusty Dell XPS running Windows XP Pro. A while back I installed Subversion and got it working with mod_dav and authz_svn to serve multiple repositories, each with their own user and group permissions. It was tricky to set up and there are some finer points that most documentation I read doesn’t address. I followed a few different web resources like this great beginners guide, but ultimately it boils down to the 5 simple steps below.

Just recently I needed to add a new repository. I thought I had done everything right, but when I went to use it for the first time, I got the following errors:

D:\svn\repos>svn mkdir http://localhost:8080/svn/myproject/trunk -m "Trunk"
svn: OPTIONS of 'http://localhost:8080/svn/myproject': 200 OK (http://localhost:8080)

D:\svn\repos>svn ls http://localhost:8080/svn/myproject/trunk
svn: URL 'http://localhost:8080/svn/myproject/trunk' non-existent in that revision

D:\svn\repos>svn ls http://localhost:8080/svn/myproject
svn: Could not open the requested SVN filesystem

If you are getting any of these common errors, this post is for you.

When using svn over http, you have to use Apache’s configuration files to control access to each repository separately. Start by installing Apache, Subversion, and then referencing these three modules in your httpd.conf as follows:

LoadModule  dav_module             modules/mod_dav.so
LoadModule  dav_svn_module         modules/mod_dav_svn.so
LoadModule  authz_svn_module       modules/mod_authz_svn.so

Now we’re ready to begin.

1) Add the repository:

#> svnadmin create D:\svn\repos\myproject

*(On Unix systems, chown -R myproject so it is writable by the user Apache runs as)*

2) Edit your httpd.conf (or extras/httpd-vhosts.conf) adding something like this:

<Location /svn/myproject>
   DAV svn
   SVNPath d:/svn/repos/myproject
   AuthType Basic
   AuthName "My Project SVN Repo"
   AuthUserFile c:/etc/svn-auth-file
   Require valid-user
   AuthzSVNAccessFile c:/etc/svn-acl
</Location>

3) Add the project to your svn auth file at c:/etc/svn-acl (it’s referenced in the Location directive in your Apache config.)

[groups]
yourgroupname = yourusername, user_b, user_c

[myproject:/]   
yourusername = rw
@yourgroupname = rw

This is what tells Apache which users and groups are allowed to access the path(s) in your repository.

4) Give yourusername an htpasswd (and user_b and user_c)

cd c:/etc/
htpasswd -c svn-auth-file yourusername

*(If that file already exists, omit the -c option)*

5) Finally, restart Apache

httpd -k restart

Then you’re ready to create trunk

#> svn mkdir http://localhost:8080/svn/myproject/trunk -m "Adding trunk"

Committed revision 1.

I got the errors shown above when forgetting step one or more of these steps.

Developing Web Apps on Amazon AWS EC2 with Mac OS X

I recently set aside an hour to read Robert Sosinski’s blog Starting Amazon EC2 with Mac OS X. What a fantastic guide that is! Thanks, Robert!

Hopefully he won’t mind my slightly modified mirror, below.

Starting Amazon EC2 with Mac OS X

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) is now one of the top choices for cloud-based deployment. With EC2, you can ramp up to a massive server farm in a matter of minutes, while scaling back down to a single server when things calm down. The benefits are obvious, as you only pay for what you need and you have access to more computing power right when you need it.

EC2 works on the idea of server instances. You start with building one instance, which costs as low as a few cents per hour of operation, and you can even start free (with a t1 micro for a month!).

An instance acts just like a dedicated machine, with full root access and the ability to install any software you choose. You can chose from a variety of sizes and operating systems. An m1.small instance, for example, comes with some pretty competitive system specs including:

1.7 Ghz Xeon CPU
1.75 GB of RAM
160 GB of local storage
250 MB/s network interface

If your first instance gets some heavy traffic, EC2 can build another one automatically for another few cents an hour. Turnkey infrastructure has never been better.

Getting Started

First off, you have to set up your computer so you can connect to and administer your Amazon EC2 account.

If you don’t already have an account at Amazon.com, create one now.

1. Log into your Amazon.com account and then click over to the Amazon AWS subdomain and sign up for EC2. It will be linked to your Amazon.com account.

2. Once signed up, hover over the yellow “Your Web Services Account” button. Here, you should select the “AWS Access Identifiers” link.

3. Login, if prompted.

4. Select the “X.509 certificates” link.

5. Click on the “Create New” link. Amazon will ask you if you are sure, say yes. Doing so will generate two files.

A PEM encoded X.509 certificate named something like cert-xxxxxxx.pem
A PEM encoded RSA private key named something like pk-xxxxxxx.pem

6. Download both of these files.

What is PEM?

PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) is a protocol originally developed to secure email. Although rarely deployed for its indented purpose, it’s encoding mechanism for generating certificates is used for quite a few web services including Amazon EC2, PayPal Web Payments Pro and SSH Key Pairs.

Learn more about PEM by reading this and this.

7. Download the Amazon EC2 Command-Line Tools.

8. Open the Terminal, go to your home directory, make a new ~/.ec2 directory and open it in the Finder.

$ cd
$ mkdir .ec2
$ cd .ec2
$ open .

9. Copy the certificate and private key from your download directory into your ~/.ec2 directory.

10. Unzip the Amazon EC2 Command-Line Tools, look in the new directory and move both the bin and lib directory into your ~/.ec2 directory. This directory should now have the following:

The cert-xxxxxxx.pem file
The pk-xxxxxxx.pem file
The bin directory
The lib directory

11. Now, you need to set a few environmental variables. To help yourself out in the future, you will be placing everything necessary in your ~/.bash_profile file. What this will do is automatically setup the Amazon EC2 Command-Line Tools every time you start a Terminal session. Just open ~/.bash_profile in your text editor and add the following to the end of it:

# Setup Amazon EC2 Command-Line Tools
export EC2_HOME=~/.ec2
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=`ls $EC2_HOME/pk-*.pem`
export EC2_CERT=`ls $EC2_HOME/cert-*.pem`
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home/

12. As you made some changes to your ~/.bash_profile file, you will need to reload it for everything to take effect. Run this:

$ source ~/.bash_profile
Creating and Connecting to a Server Instance

Launching an EC2 Instance from the Command Line on Mac OS X

Now that your computer is set up to work with EC2, it is time to make your server instance.

1. Type this into the Terminal.

$ ec2-describe-images -o amazon

What does the -o option do?

The -o option stands for owner. In this example, you are asking EC2 to describe the images that belong Amazon. To see every image available, give the -a option instead.

2. After a short wait, you will be given a list of available images which should look something like this.

IMAGE ami-20b65349 ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-base.manifest.xml
IMAGE ami-22b6534b ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-mysql.manifest.xml
IMAGE ami-23b6534a ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache.manifest.xml
IMAGE ami-25b6534c ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache-mysql.manifest.xml
IMAGE ami-26b6534f ec2-public-images/developer-image.manifest.xml
IMAGE ami-2bb65342 ec2-public-images/getting-started.manifest.xml
IMAGE ami-36ff1a5f ec2-public-images/fedora-core6-base-x86_64.manifest.xml
IMAGE ami-bd9d78d4 ec2-public-images/demo-paid-AMI.manifest.xml

Note that you can also do something like

$ ec2-describe-instances -a > ami-list-2011-11.txt

and then search the generated text file for platforms you might need, such as magento or wordpress:

$ cat ami-list-2011-11.txt | grep magento

3. Lets create something simple for now, a Fedora Core 4 machine with Apache. To do this, we need to generate a keypair. This keypair will supply the credentials we need to SSH (Secure Shell) into our server instance. To make a new keypair named ec2-keypair, type the following:

$ ec2-add-keypair ec2-keypair

4. This will create a RSA Private Key and then output it to the screen. You are going to copy this entire key, including the —–BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY—– and —–END RSA PRIVATE KEY—– lines to the clipboard. Now, go into your ~/.ec2 directory, make a new file called ec2-keypair, open it in your text editor, paste the entire key and save it.

5. Next, it is important to change the permissions of your keypair file, or else EC2 will not let you connect to it via SSH. To do this, just type the following in your ~/.ec2 directory:

$ chmod 600 ec2-keypair

6. Time to create your new machine. Ensure you are in your ~/.ec2 directory and type the following, substituting “ami-23b6534a” with the id of the image you wish to create.

NOTE: It is important to understand that once you tell EC2 to start creating your server instance, you will start paying 10 cents every hour until you terminate it.

$ ec2-run-instances ami-23b6534a -k ec2-keypair
RESERVATION r-xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx default
INSTANCE i-xxxxxxxx ami-23b6534a pending ec2-keypair

7. It may take a bit for EC2 to start your new machine, but you can always check its status by typing:

$ ec2-describe-instances
RESERVATION r-xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx default
INSTANCE i-xxxxxxxx ami-23b6534a ec2.compute-1.amazonaws.com

8. Great, your instance is up and running. Take note of your server’s web address (ec2-xx-xxx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com) and ID (i-xxxxxxxx) as you will need both of these later in this tutorial. If you forget them, you can always type the ec2-describe-instances command again. Now, lets prep our server by enabling port 22 for SSH access and port 80 so Apache can serve web pages.

$ ec2-authorize default -p 22
PERMISSION default ALLOWS tcp 22 22 FROM CIDR 0.0.0.0/0

$ ec2-authorize default -p 80
PERMISSION default ALLOWS tcp 80 80 FROM CIDR 0.0.0.0/0

9. This is the moment you have been waiting for, connecting to your new machine. Open a new web browser window and type in your instance’s web address. You should now see an Apache welcome page.

10. Fantastic, your instance is serving the Apache test page. Now, lets SSH into the machine and check it out. Ensure you are in your ~/.ec2 directory as you will need your ec2-keypair file.

$ ssh -i ec2-keypair root@ec2-xx-xxx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com

11. SSH will ask you if you are sure you want to connect. Just enter yes and you should be connected to your server instance.

[root@domU-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-E2 ~]#

12. Enjoy.

Terminating Your Server Instance

Keep in mind that you are still on the meter. Because of this, you should shut down your server instance if you do not plan on using it.

1. Enter the terminate command with your server’s instance ID.

$ ec2-terminate-instances i-xxxxxxxx
INSTANCE i-xxxxxxxx running shutting-down
2. Take a look to see if everything is terminated.

$ ec2-describe-instances
RESERVATION r-xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx default
INSTANCE i-xxxxxxxx ami-23b6534a terminated
3. Done and done.

Next Steps

Now that you have an intro to using Amazon EC2 instances on Mac OS X, in step 7 above, you installed the tools. Check out the Amazon AWS Command Line Tools API for all the various ways you can monitor your EC2 instances and other AWS services from the command line. Here are a few more resources:

• AWS EC2 API Documentation
• Finding a suitable AMI – Amazon Machine Image
• Generating a new SSH Key-pair
• Launching an Amazon EC2 Instance
• You can even Launch EC2 Instance via the web with an HTTP Query

Amazing stuff, and more affordable than you might think. See Reserved Instances.

Thanks, Amazon.com.

Final Notes

When starting instances, be sure to take note of the Availability Zone you’re starting your instance in. If you end up creating more servers, for example, an Apache server, a MySQL server, a Memcache or Redis Server, you’ll want to make sure you start them all in the same availability zone to avoid unecessary charges and security group headaches. More about AWS Availability Zones and AWS Security Groups over at Rightscale.

Redis 101 at Desert Code Camp 2011

I’m proud to announce that I’ll be teaching Redis 101 at Desert Code Camp on November 5, 2011.

Redis is a powerful memory-resident data store.

In order to give you a good background on what Redis is, let’s take a trip down memory lane, back to our first lesson on how computers work. Computers have a hard disk drive, which enables data and files to be stored permanently (or, at least, for very long periods of time). They also have memory, or RAM, which is volatile, but very, very fast, comparatively.

Why do we need both hard-drives and memory? Economics, mainly. Cheap, huge hard drives can store millions of files permanently, even if the power goes out. The tradeoff to all that massive amount of permanent storage is that hard drives are slow. RAM, on the other hand, is volatile storage, meaning that whatever is in RAM is lost when you power down your computer. Data in RAM is blazing fast, though. The trade-offs for all that blazing speed are high cost and impermanence.

The latest Solid State Disks (SSD’s) are breaking some of these rules by being decent-sized, permanent storage that’s faster and quieter than a regular hard drive, but not as expensive as RAM. SSDs are more like hard drives or memory sticks with no moving parts. What’s Cool About SSDs would make a good blog post in the near future.

Back to caching. In general terms, a cache is simply a faster place to retrieve data from.

Your computer can access data stored in RAM much, much faster than it can access files on disk. When you launch a program, your computer is reading the application data from disk (slow) and loading it into memory (fast) so you can work on it.

Several forms of caching are used to speed up surfing the web.

You’re probably most familiar with client-side caching—your browser cache, or Temporary Internet Files for you Windows users. Web browsers use a local cache (just a special hidden folder) on your hard drive to store the stuff you’ve downloaded before. The theory here is, if you’ve already downloaded the home page of a site, chances are most of the files, scripts and stylesheets are reused across other pages on the stite, so by keeping local copy in the cache, your browser doesn’t have to re-fetch assets from the server again.

Server-side caching, on the other hand, is a technique implemented by web application architects, to help speed up web applications. Some of the things that can be cached on the server-side include frequently-used files, query results, or processing PHP templates into their rendered HTML. With server-side caching, the idea is to alleviate some or most of the work your web server has to do when processing a particular request.

Going back to our lesson on how computers work, we know hard drives are slow and memory is very fast. So when talking about maximum performance for web servers, we had better be looking at storing data in memory.

Two of the most popular memory-caching platforms for PHP are Memcache and APC, the Alternative PHP Cache. These PHP extensions have been around a very long time, and are able to utilize RAM, instead of files on disk, to make data available to your PHP scripts almost instantly.

Memcache and APC are known as key-value stores. Memcache is only a key-value store, meaning that’s basically the only feature it offers. APC is a key-value store, and also an opcode cache. An opcode cache actually compiles PHP scripts into machine-executable code, very much like compiling C# into a .DLL or Java code into a .war file. Compiled code runs faster than code that has to be parsed first.

With any key-value store, you hand it a key and some data, and then later, you can lookup the data again almost instantly by using the original key.

So why Redis? Like Memcache, Redis is also a key-value store, but it also offers several unique, blazing-fast data structures, including hashes, sets, lists and more. In addition, Redis includes a terrific write-to-disk feature as well as master-slave replication, giving you an extremely flexible and powerful set of tools, that fits in perfectly with any database-driven web application. And all for the amazing low-low price of only $0.00! By combining APC’s opcode cache capabilities, with the flexibility of Redis, you have everything you need to make your web applications really scream.

Whether you’ve never used a caching platform before or you’re already fluent in Memcache or APC for high-performance website scalability, come and learn why Redis is quite possibly the best thing since sliced bread.

Using XDebug with Command-line PHP and NetBeans

Magic sauce, so easy to misplace:

export $XDEBUG_CONFIG="idekey=netbeans-xdebug"
echo $XDEBUG_CONFIG
idekey=netbeans-xdebug

The string, `netbeans-xdebug` is configurable inside NetBeans preferences.

How to install MySQL 5.5 on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

This may not be obvious, but on the new Macs that ship with Lion, you can use the MySQL 5.5 64-bit dmg installer. It works perfectly on Lion, even though the MySQL site (still, at the time of this writing) says Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. You can use the Preference Pane to stop and start MySQL.

Now after MySQL 5.5 is running, strangely enough, you cannot simply launch terminal and type mysql -u rootBash will complain that it can’t find mysql. So we have to help it like so:

1. Use your favorite text editor to edit the file /Users/%yourname%/.bash_profile If this file doesn’t exist you can create it.
2. Add the following line to your .bash_profile export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/mysql/bin and save the file. Be careful editing this file exactly as above. You can render terminal unable to find all your programs if you break your $PATH.
3. Quit and relaunch terminal, or type source ~/.bash_profle and hit return to reload the changes in your profile.
4. Check your $PATH by typing echo $PATH and pressing return. You should see something like this /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin
5. Now you should be able to run mysql -u root which means there is no root password by default!
6. Run this next, at the mysql prompt GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your_password_here' WITH GRANT OPTION;This is how to secure your root user login.

Now, for PHP to use this connection I had to tweak my system as shown below:

1. Run phpinfo() and check out the path PHP is trying to use for mysql.sock. On my new Mac Mini, it was/var/mysql/mysql.sock
2. From terminal, I did sudo find / -name mysql.sock -print
3. The critical line of output shows that MySQL 5.5 installs the sock to /private/tmp/mysql.sock
4. Now we need to create a symlink for PHP to be able to access the mysql.sock. Trouble is if you try it you’ll get an error because /var/mysql doesn’t exist. So next, do sudo mkdir /var/mysql
5. Finally, do this sudo ln -s /private/tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock

Did that work for you?

Face Facebook Sharing Security Head On

Sharing Policies on Facebook just got an upgrade. I thought you might like to see the new enhancements.

1. Say who your with. Right off the bat, you can select the friends you want to be involved with a particular stream or conversation.

2. Add Location to your posts. You can now define places where your conversation has relevance.

3. Control privacy when you post – or after. If you realize a conversation might be better kept between certain people, you can now change the way your wall posts are published during or after the conversation starts.

Visit this page on the Facebook.com Help pages For a more in-depth look at how to use Facebook’s newer, more secure sharing features.

Zend & RightScale: The Ferrari of PHP Deployment has Arrived

Zend Server is already the Cadillac of PHP Application Servers.

The Ferrari of PHP Application Deployments has arrived.

At least some, if not many PHP application developers are comfortable maintaining an Apache-based web server on Linux, the critical hardware that most often drives the web. Apache is free, and PHP is free, but you can’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty if you need to upgrade your software, install a new module, or tweak your server config.

Most, if not all PHP developers are familiar with Zend, the engine that powers the PHP scripting language interpreter, and many great sites are developed using the Zend Framework.

The Zend Framework is an enormous collection of ready-to-go building blocks (object-oriented PHP classes) for building just about any type of web application. There’s no question that their Zend Studio IDE ($299, built on Eclipse) is a solid PHP development platform, and Zend Server ($1,195 and up for support licenses) provides a terrific web-based GUI for managing your development, staging or production server’s LAMP stack.

A little pricey, maybe, but if you rely on a LAMP environment for your deployed software applications and you don’t have a lot of time or resources to be fiddling with your server software, Zend solutions still are excellent product choices to rely on from the company most closely associated with PHP development.

In today’s inbox, Zend announced a partnership with RightScale. If you’re not already familiar with RightScale, their service piggy-backs onto Amazon AWS to give you a nice, clean, friendly UI to manage and deploy webscale applications in the cloud. If you’ve ever experimented with Amazon AWS, you know it can be a little confusing and cumbersome to manage multiple server configurations as they scale.

With RightScale, you can save server templates and security group configurations, manage users and more. In the same way that Jenkins can help you automate testing your PHP applications and delivering them seamlessly to your server environments, RightScale can help you manage multiple-server cloud server application architectures with ease. Really a big time-saver.

Definitely not cheap, but absolutely worth checking out if you have a decent budget and need to save time managing PHP cloud deployments.

Scalable, Flexible, Portable PHP in the Cloud

RightScale and Zend recently introduced a solution to provide a best practices path to launching and maintaining highly-available PHP applications in the cloud. Learn more about the RightScale and Zend Solution Pack: attend our webinar on August 17.

Join us on August 17 for a demo of this new cloud solution that
enables you to:

• Provision a pre-configured, high availability PHP environment in minutes • Autoscale your application based on system and application load metrics • Receive system, server and application-level monitoring, alerting and diagnostics • Abstract your application from underlying cloud infrastructure to enable future portability  Topic: Introducing “PaaS in a Box”: Scalable, Flexible, Portable PHP in the Cloud Date: Wednesday, August 17 Time: 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET / 5 PM BST / 6 PM CEST Speakers: Uri Budnik – Director ISV Partner Program, RightScale Claudio Gentile – Sales Engineer, RightScale Kevin Schroeder – Zend Technology Evangelist, Zend

How to install PHP APC extension on Snow Leopard

I followed several posts on the Apple Suppor forum to install APC on Snow Leopard (not Server, but this forum seems much more appropriate as I am using Snow Leopard on my local MBP 17 for serious web development, trying to match my Ubuntu Server config as closely as possible.)

Most notably, these:

discussions.apple.com/thread/2448001
discussions.apple.com/message/12923918
discussions.apple.com/message/11696363
discussions.apple.com/message/10454666

as well as

www.kevinworthington.com/nginx-mac-os-snow-leopard-2-minutes/
serverfault.com/questions/206633/failed-to-instal-apc-via-pecl-install-apc

I had to instal PCRE 8.12 before APC 3.1.9 install would work. Wincent has perfect instructions for that.

Now back in my APC source directory, doing phpize and ./configure resulted in test failures; I realized that the recommended way of installing APC is via pecl channel-discover pecl.php.net
pecl install APC


This succeeded: Build process completed successfully
Installing '/usr/include/php/ext/apc/apc_serializer.h'
Installing '/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/apc.so'
install ok: channel://pecl.php.net/APC-3.1.9
configuration option "php_ini" is not set to php.ini location
You should add "extension=apc.so" to php.ini


Okay, so I add extension=apc.so to php.ini and restart apache. sh-3.2# php -i | grep apc
apc
apc.cache_by_default => On => On
apc.canonicalize => On => On
apc.coredump_unmap => Off => Off
apc.enable_cli => Off => Off
apc.enabled => On => On
apc.file_md5 => Off => Off
apc.file_update_protection => 2 => 2
apc.filters => no value => no value
apc.gc_ttl => 3600 => 3600
apc.include_once_override => Off => Off
apc.lazy_classes => Off => Off
apc.lazy_functions => Off => Off
apc.max_file_size => 1M => 1M
apc.mmap_file_mask => no value => no value
apc.num_files_hint => 1000 => 1000
apc.preload_path => no value => no value
apc.report_autofilter => Off => Off
apc.rfc1867 => Off => Off
apc.rfc1867_freq => 0 => 0
apc.rfc1867_name => APC_UPLOAD_PROGRESS => APC_UPLOAD_PROGRESS
apc.rfc1867_prefix => upload_ => upload_
apc.rfc1867_ttl => 3600 => 3600
apc.serializer => default => default
apc.shm_segments => 1 => 1
apc.shm_size => 32M => 32M
apc.slam_defense => On => On
apc.stat => On => On
apc.stat_ctime => Off => Off
apc.ttl => 0 => 0
apc.use_request_time => On => On
apc.user_entries_hint => 4096 => 4096
apc.user_ttl => 0 => 0
apc.write_lock => On => On


So now we know, from the command line anyway, PHP CLI is reporting it has APC installed.

Now here’s the interesting part… from Apache (e.g. trying to run any local PHP file http://localhost/info.php for example) I just get a white page of death.

If I comment that extension out and restart Apache, PHP files work again.

Hmm, lets look at the error.tail -f error_log
shows: Fatal error: Unknown: apc_fcntl_unlock failed: in Unknown on line 0


I google that and find this bug report, where it is stated that a patch is available for apc_lock.h.

I go back to the PECL APC source site and browse the sources in trunk, find the apc_lock.h file, download it, put it into my APC-3.1.9 source directory and run phpize
./configure
make clean
make install
apachectl restart


Note that `make clean` is the magic bit there since we already installed APC from these sources, we need to make a new fresh install from these same sources.

Now everything is working happily again.

Good luck with yours!

Matt Mullenweg’s Photos are in MY WordPress Database

It may come as a surprise to you, just like it was to me, to find hundreds of personal photos from Matt Mullenweg’s trip to Alaska in MY WordPress blog database.

Seriously, folks, this is rather rude in my opinion. I invite you to Check your wp_options table for instances of ma.tt and you may be quite surprised what you find.

SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_value LIKE '%ma.tt%'

To be fair, the actual photos aren’t in my database, but useless links to them are. Apparently WordPress stores newsworthy feeds it receives (when is unclear – all day? when I login to wp-admin?) in the wp_options table.

I’m shocked and somewhat horrified to find thousands of rows of this useless junk mucking up my WordPress database unnecessarily. I’m not sure there’s any way to inject malicious code into a database through a news feed that is automagically stored, but it sure seems like a potential security risk to me. If there’s a way to turn off this storing of feeds, I’d like to know.