Web Developer apache / php / mysql code and configuration snippets

Serialize error at offset – how to fix

lampbear — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:59:13 +0000

Recently I have been storing some stuff in mysql using serialize which is very useful at storing things like arrays in a DB safely without anything corrupting. However recently I have been getting the error message “unserialize() [function.unserialize]: Error at offset 2 of …”.. after looking around at some strange and confusing solutions.. simple code fixed it:

$safeformysqldata = base64_encode(serialize($cutearrayhere));

and to get it back out of the DB:

unserialize(base64_decode($row['mydata']));

I hope this helps someone

Queries using datetime in mysql to search by month

lampbear — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 03:15:19 +0000

I recently started working with a sales database and rather than using my personal favorite timestamp column type they used datetime – it took me a couple googles before I finally found the syntax to do queries to find date ranges:

SELECT * FROM `sales` WHERE MONTH(column_name) = 6 AND DAY(column_name) < 10;

Will get all the sales before the 10th in the month of June and ANY year not so great if you have more than a years data hehe but now you know how it works and to find year is YEAR(column_name)

If you wanted to get all records that were for this year you can use:

Select * from table_name where field_name > YEAR(CURDATE());

How to send UTF8 encoded mail in php

lampbear — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:15:35 +0000

After some of my foreign language emails were coming out strange I had a look around to find a way to send out mails through the mail function in PHP.. here it is:

$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n" . "Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8" . "\r\n"; mail($to, "=?UTF-8?B?".base64_encode($subject)."?=", $message, $headers);

You can use this method to utf encode the sender/recipient/message. Be sure to change text/plain to text/html if you are sending html in a mail

Fix for X-Authentication-Warning: .. apache set sender to using -f

lampbear — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:01:54 +0000

Like many people I love to send mail from PHP using apache! But when I do a tail -f of my mail logs I can see many “X-Authentication-Warning”‘s. I don’t like to see warnings in my logs and I read rumors on the net that this also affects the deliverability of your mail.. which is bad!

Anyway to fix this you just need to add apache as a trusted user in the trusted users list at /etc/mail/trusted-users

After opening that file and adding apache on its own line the error message vanishes

Find the size of the current working directory in linux

lampbear — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:09:49 +0000

Its not so obvious how to find out the size of the directory and all subdirectories in linux but here is the command for quick reference
du -sch
This will tell you the disk space used by the current working directory and all its sub-directories in a human readable format!

Restart the firewall on CentOS/Redhat

lampbear — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:34:51 +0000

Another simple one
service iptables restart
Simply restarts iptables on centos or redhat! I wonder how my shell client stays connected when it does this though..

Start/stop and restart mysql server

lampbear — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:36:25 +0000

So simple I should know this by now
/etc/init.d/mysqld restart /etc/init.d/mysqld start /etc/init.d/mysqld stop

That works for RedHat, this works for Ubuntu/Debian:
/etc/init.d/mysql restart

Unzip all zip files into current directory on linux using find

lampbear — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 04:55:50 +0000

I needed a quick and dirty command to unzip all the .zip files in the current working directory on my redhat box and this was it!
find *.zip -exec unzip {} \;
Enjoy

EDIT: Same but for rar files, auto renames the files if they exist and uses rar name as the directory:
find *.rar -exec unrar e -ad -or {} \;

Use wget to download from hotfile – automated!

lampbear — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 07:30:09 +0000

To automatically download from Hotfile using Wget you can do the following:

wget --save-cookies /path/to/hotfilecookie --post-data "returnto=%2F&user=1234567&pass=yourpass&=Login" -O - http://www.hotfile.com/login.php > /dev/null

This will save your login to a cookie on your server and then we can do:

wget -c --load-cookies /path/to/hotfilecookie -i /path/to/inputfile -o /path/to/downloadlog -nc -b

This will set wget running in the background logging its progress to a download log. It will skip downloading any files that already exist, and it will read all the files to download from a file called inputfile. I hope this helps someone

Stop mails sent from PHP being marked as spam by editing SPF records!

lampbear — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 07:56:43 +0000

So I just moved servers and my inbound mail traffic was going down each day.. I took a look at the mail headers and got this:
Return-Path: Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 66.x.x.x is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of support@thaifriendly.com) client-ip=66.x.x.x;

I managed to change this from a neutral to a pass by adding a return path to my mail command in PHP:
mail($toemail,$subject,$message,$headers," -f support@mydomain.com");
.. and by logging into namecheap and adding a TXT record to my domain (Login -> select domain -> All host records) for host name add @ for IP address/URL add “v=spf1 a:my.mailserver.ip.address ~all” and selecting “TXT Record”. After saving changes and sending a test mail google now happily reports:
Return-Path: Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of support@mydomain.com designates my.mailserver.ip.address as permitted sender) client-ip=my.mailserver.ip.address;

It took me a few searches to get all this information together, particularily editing host records in namecheap too, I hope it helps someone!