Hi everyone!

In case you haven’t noticed, things look a bit different around here. I am in the process of migrating the website content from a Drupal content management system to a WordPress installation. This will allow me to emphasize the content provided here without having to work quite so hard on presentation issues.

Please be patient while I finish the migration, and check back often for updates!

Technorati Tags: beyrent, website, wordpress, drupal

Because I use IMAP as an email protocol, all of my email is stored on the mail server. Unfortunately, having all your eggs in one basket means that you will lose everything in a catastrophic failure. I wrote the following script to backup some user directories into compressed tarballs, which will allow me to recover data.

#!/bin/csh

#------------------------------------------------------------------------#
# @name		backupUsers
# @author	Erich Beyrent
# @summary	The purpose of this script is to create backups of specific
#               user directories.  Compressed tarballs are created and then
#               moved into the backups directory
#
# === Modification History ===
# 1.0.0  24-mar-2005  [ecb]  initial version
#
#------------------------------------------------------------------------#

# Set a debug flag to enable print messages
set debug = 0

# Set the location of the backup directory
set backup_dir = /usr/local/backups/users

# Set the location of the user home directories
set home_dir = /usr/home

# Get today's date
set mydate = `date +%d-%m-%Y`;

# Create backups of the user home directories
foreach directory(`ls $home_dir`)
	# DEBUG
	if($debug > 0) then
                echo $directory
	endif

	# DEBUG
   	if($debug > 0) then
		echo "Backing up $directory"
	endif

	# build the filename
	set filename = "$directory-home_$mydate.tar.gz"

	# Tar and compress the user's home directory
	/usr/bin/tar -cvzf $filename /usr/home/$directory

	# Move the backup file to the backups directory
	mv $filename $backup_dir
end

# Clean up any backup files that are older than seven days
find $backup_dir -mtime +7 -exec rm -f {} \;

Programming :: Shell Languages
Technology

As it turns out, upgrading FreeBSD is not as difficult as I thought it would be. The process is downright simple for the most part. The trickiest part is running mergemaster, and upgrading the contents of /etc. The risk is somewhat mitigated if you backup /etc before you run the mergemaster command.

Here is how I upgraded my system from FreeBSD 5.3.

The first thing to do is to create a file for updating the FreeBSD source tree. I called this file "standard-supfile", and placed it in /etc. The file looks like this:

  
*default host=cvsup2.FreeBSD.org
*default base=/usr
*default prefix=/usr
*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5_4
*default delete use-rel-suffix
*default compress
src-all
  

To update the source, run the following command:

  
onion# cvsup -g -L 2 /etc/standard-supfile
  

This takes a while, so get some coffee and get to work on that programming project you've been putting off... Once the source has been updated, it's time to rebuild the system.

  
onion#  cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf
onion#  cp -p GENERIC MYKERNAL
onion#  config MYKERNAL; cd ../compile/MYKERNAL; make depend; make;
onion#  make install;
onion#  tar cf /tmp/etc.tar /etc
onion#  mergemaster
  

I like to make a copy of the GENERIC file, because any changes I may make to it will get wiped out next time I update the source. By making a copy of the file and adding my changes to the copy, those changes are preserved.

After running mergemaster, reboot and /etc/motd should be updated to display the current version of the system.

Technology

I admit it, I am a big fan of the show "Desperate Housewives" and I am not ashamed. I mean, after all, I know it's like a soap opera in primetime, but the stories are well written, the acting is decent, the women are HOT, and the show is genuinely funny.

My only complaint is that the show is on ABC, which lately, seems to stand for "Always Broadcasting Commercials". Let's be clear on one point - I HATE COMMERCIALS. I have never once in my entire life seen a commercial and suddenly felt the urge to go out and spend money on that product. Not once. I can't stand the jingles. I can't stand the cheesy humor. And I really can't stand the constant interruptions to my favorite shows.

I watched the latest Desperate Housewives episode last night, and if you did too, you might have noticed that there is barely eight minutes of footage before the next round of commercials. We had a commercial break at 9:30. The show came back on at 9:32. Another commercial break at 9:39. The show came back on at 9:41. Another commercial break at 9:48. It's more than just invasive - it's downright disturbing because your brain and attention has to keep switching gears. It's no wonder why we have such things as TiVo.

Which brings me to why I need $300.00. I don't like TiVo either, and it's because as a company, they have to bow to the pressures of the networks. You used to be able to skip commercials entirely. Not anymore - TiVo and Comcast are jointly developing an advertising system that inserts up-to-date commercials into previously recorded programming. This whopper follows news that TiVo has begun testing a new advertising format that will appear as users fast forward through commercials on its digital video recorder service. I am, however, a big fan of DIY-type PVRs. Windows Media Center, MythTV, and Sage all offer the same functionality as a TiVO, but with true ad blocking. The added benefit to building your own is that you are truly not restricted by the amount you can record. Why should I have to settle for a 250GB or 400GB hard drive in a TiVo, when I can built a fileserver with a few terrabytes of storage that can be NFS mounted to my PVR?

Technology

One of my recent projects for a customer of mine, ResortScope, LLC, involved setting up some web services to allow access to data in our database to external consumers. To provide this functionality, I used the NuSOAP library and PHP. However, one of the limitations of the NuSOAP library is that it is unable to parse SOAP headers, which typically contain authentication information. Consider:

			test
			1a232d4dg35

                     foo
                     bar

As you can see, the username and password are embedded in the SOAP:header. So, to get at this data, you will need to parse the header yourself. The way I chose to do this was to subclass the NuSOAP soap_server class and override the service method.

_objParser = new MyXMLParser();

		// Call the parent constructor method and pass the WSDL flag to it
		parent::soap_server($wsdl);

	} // End Function

        function service($data)
	{
		// Parse the xml message
		$this->_objParser->setXMLData($data);

		// Retrieve the authentication information from the xml message
		$arrCredentials = $this->_objParser->getCredentials();

		// Sanity check - did we get the credentials?
		if(is_array($arrCredentials) &&
		  ($arrCredentials['username'] != "") &&
		  ($arrCredentials['password'] != ""))
		{
			// Authenticate the user
			$this->_intWSUserID = $this->_authenticate($arrCredentials);

			// If authentication was successful, handle the rest of the message
			if($this->_intWSUserID > 0)
			{
				parent::service($data);
			}
                        else
                        {
                                // return a SOAP fault
                        }
		}

	} // End Function	

        function _authenticate($arrCredentials)
	{
		// Sanity check: did we get a valid array?
		if(! is_array($arrCredentials))
		{
			// return a SOAP fault
		}

                // Handle your authentication code here.  I use a MySQL database for holding user data

         } // End Function

} // End of Class
?>

In this above example, I deal with a class called "MyXMLParser", which is an object that has methods for parsing XML data. You could just as easily parse the data using native PHP methods. As you can see, the AuthenticationInfo is parsed out of the SOAP message header, and the username and password are extracted and passed to the _authenticate() method. How you choose to do your authentication is up to you. In my case, I return the userID from the database for the authenticated user. If and only if I get a userID back from the _authenticate() method do I call the service() method in the parent class.

Thanks to Scott Nichol for a great PHP library!

Technorati Tags: php nusoap SOAP

Programming :: PHP
Technology