Server uptime monitoring

For a while now I had wanted to monitor in real time my web server's availability.  But how?  Anything on the server itself would fail - because, if the server was down, the script would not work. After the event, the logs would show what's happened of course; but I wanted instant notification of a problem. Lots of companies offer this service at a price.  I wanted it free!  The solution turns out to be quite simple.  Sign up to a free web server service.  I picked http://www.000webhost.com/ and created a script on that machine that runs every five minutes to look up a small file on my main server.  If it fails to find the file, the script sends me an alert email.  This does generate the occasional 'false negative' but that is better than the main site being down for hours unbeknown to me.  If the script is successful this is recorded on a database.  Once a day the script records the stats for day, purges the database table and sends me a summary.  I think that is quite neat...

Form submission with alert/confirm

This has been a perennial issue for me. I'd have a form with multiple submit buttons; and on one or more - but not all - of the submit buttons I would want a confirm dialogue. 'Save' or 'Amend' might go straight through but 'Delete' would be intercepted for a confirmation. I used to put a section in the form response page setting up another form with a confirm button. But I think I have found a more elegant solution, below (though it does rely on JavaScript being enabled).

In the form add a hidden field and submit button as follows:

<input type="hidden" name="confirm_delete" id="confirm_delete" value="0" />

<input type="submit" name="delete" value="Delete" onClick="confirmDelete(this.form);" />

Add a JavaScript function like this:

function confirmDelete(form) {
var answer = confirm("Are you sure you want to deleted this?");
if (answer == true) {
form.confirm_delete.value = 1;
form.submit();
}
}

Then you can handle the confirmed deletion by testing the hidden field

if($_POST['confirm_delete'] == 1){
// do whatever needs doing
}

SEO advice

Gave some today that is worth capturing:

Use title and description meta-tags, ideally varied page by page. Google has an issue with multiple use of the same text for some reason.

Google ignores the 'keywords' meta tag but other search engines pay it some attention so it is worth keeping.

A good 'description' meta-tag is essential.

Also title could be a bit longer (up to 65 characters including spaces)

Get as many people as you can to link to you from blogs, other websites, articles and so on.

Let's see if that elevates c-a-mayer-memorial.org.uk

Yesterday's outage

Apologies to anyone inconvenienced by last night's short outage. GoDaddy said they had a communications issue with a number of servers so I am relieved that it was not a user error or a DOS attack. In all it lasted less than ah hour I think.

Lysandra Press now live

Today we launch the site of a new ebook publisher, lysandrapress.com. Please go have a look and buy some books...

Ajax

How brilliant is this. I cannot believe I have not found this solution before. I have so many pages that depend on a user input to connect the client and server sides of a site, not Ajax can do all of that for them, so fewer clicks. Now to remember where they were and go upgrade them...

cPanel

With some trepidation I am moving my server and control panel. So Bye-bye Arizona and Plesk and Hello Europe (still not sure where GoDaddy's base is!) and cPanel. No doubt there will be teething troubles, but Plesk has never been that friendly to me and the newer fancier server will assist now that I am hosting more sites and more particularly for paying customers/partners.

New client

Today saw the first steps towards building a new site for Portsmere, with the purchase of the domain name portsmere.com. Now to make a great site for them.

Morethanpictures.co.uk

Is now live. I am rather pleased with it; but, more important, so is the client. I had fun working with images in a bit more depth and applying dynamic drive's Ultimate Fade-in Slideshow and Lightbox 2. See it here

Secure MySQL connection on Godaddy virtual dedicated server

The Godaddy instructions on this are pretty hard to find and the default settings for open_basedir and directory permissions make it hard to do; so here is what I have done that works. You will need to be using SSH and your control panel (I use Plesk, but I doubt this is much different with cPanel and others).

The key security point is that your access codes to your MySQL database really should not be in your httpdocs directory. That is accessible to the world and although it is hard to grab the information from a .php file, it is not impossible. If the file sits above the httpdocs folder, it cannot be seen from the web.

So using SSH create a folder (one per domain, but if you use only one database for a number of sites it could be one for all) called mysql with

mkdir mysql

then still in SSH change the ownership to the normal owner of the domain with

chown [user] mysql

Now open up the conf directory to the same user with

chown [user] conf

Go to your control panel and create these two files

1. a file in conf called vhost.conf (content below) and

2. a file in mysql called mysql.php (content below)

Finally, either in SSH Restart the server with

/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -a -v

or you can do it from control panel.

content of vhost.conf (where x is the domain)

<directory /var/www/vhosts/x/httpdocs>

php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/x/httpdocs:/tmp:/var/www/vhosts/x/mysql:"

</directory>

content of mysql.php

<?php

/*

THIS IS THE MASTER DATABASE CONNECTION FILE

IT SHOULD BE STORED ABOVE THE ROOT DIRECTORY IN MYSQL

AND SHOULD BE USED FOR ALL MYSQL CONNECTIONS

*/

mysql_connect("localhost", "[username]", "[password]") or die (mysql_error());

mysql_select_db("[database_name]") or die(mysql_error());

?>

To connect to the database add this in the relevant php scripts

include '/var/www/vhosts/[domain]/mysql/mysql.php';

Hope that helps someone save the time it took me to work it out...

Tjsoft.info revamp

Started a major rewrite of this site using a lot more CSS and fewer tables. Still a lot to do but the base is now there.

Server upgrades

Latest server configuration:

• httpd 2.2.8-1.fc7
• mailman 2.1.9-5.3
• mod_perl 2.0.3-9.1.fc7
• mod_python 3.3.1-3
• mysql 5.0.45-6.fc7
• perl-Apache-ASP 2.59-0.93298
• php 5.2.6-2.fc7
• plesk 9.3.0
• postgresql-server 8.2.9-1.fc7
• ruby 1.8.6.114-1.fc7
• samba 3.0.28a-1.fc7
• spamassassin 3.2.4-1.fc7
• SSHTerm 0.2.2-9.278624
• tomcat 5.5.26-1jpp.2.fc7
• webalizer 2.01_10-32

IE non-compliance

Right, that's it. I am no longer going to support IE as a suitable browser for my sites. Microsoft's continuing lack of acceptance of internationally agreed standards makes the developer's life a misery and, while it may be cool to know all the little work-arounds needed to make your site work, just, with IE, why should we? There are much better browsers that do accept the agreed standards that work, are free, are faster, more secure - need I go on.

So I have developed a little code to spot IE users and give them a warning. They can accept the limitations of IE or switch browser. I rather like it and think all web developers should follow suit...

Upgrade to PHP5

I decided to upgrade to the latest version of MyGedView, which has some nice features over the previous version, and to do this I needed PHP5. This in turn meant a server rebuild to Fedora Core 7, so basically I had to start from scratch. The server is now re-built and running sweetly, but I am still part way through restoring all the previous material/sites. It is a good way of giving the server a good spring clean!

crontab tips on GoDaddy

This was nowhere in the GoDaddy documentation so, I though I would share a working solution.

The objective was to create a single php script which a set of scheduled crontab tasks could execute from my GoDaddy virtual dedicated server. I wanted something that ran hourly, daily, weekly and monthly.

The steps I used were:

1. Create your script in the normal way. The key element is the $_SERVER['argv']['1'] variable, which is passed from the crontab line. You could pass more than one. The second would be $_SERVER['argv']['2']. You might add this for a checksum to prevent the script running if the search engines find it. I then used the first variable in a switch group to establish the start and end date for a MySQL query that runs later. So:

switch ($_SERVER['argv']['1']) {

case "hourly": // RUNS AT *:00
$d2 = date("Y-m-d H",time()).":00:00";
$d1 = date("Y-m-d H",strtotime($d2) - 3600).":00:00";
$num = 1;
break;

case "daily": // RUNS AT 00:20
$d2 = date("Y-m-d",time() - 24 * 3600);
$d1 = date("Y-m-d",strtotime($d2) - 24 * 3600);
$num = 2;
break;

case "weekly": // RUNS AT 00:40
$d2 = date("Y-m-d",time() - 24 * 3600);
$d1 = date("Y-m-d",strtotime($d2) - 7 * 24 * 3600);
$num = 3;
break;

case "monthly": // RUNS AT 01:00
$d2 = date("Y-m-d",time() - 24 * 3600);
$d1 = date("Y-m-d",strtotime($d2) - 24 * 3600 * 365.25 / 12);
$num = 4;
break;

}

$query2 = "SELECT *
FROM `".$type[$j]."`
WHERE DATE(`".$col[$j]."`) > '".$d1."'
AND DATE(`".$col[$j]."`) <= '".$d2."'";

2. Chmod this file to 'rwx r-x r-x' to allow it to be executed by the server.

3. Add a scheduled task like this:

10 0 * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain/httpdocs/cron/alerts.php hourly
20 0 * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain/httpdocs/cron/alerts.php daily
30 0 * * 1 /usr/bin/php /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain/httpdocs/cron/alerts.php weekly
40 1 1 * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain/httpdocs/cron/alerts.php monthly

I have the file in a directory called cron, but you can put it where you like.

Any HTML output your script creates will then be sent to the email address set in the preferences tab where you set up scheduled tasks. This is for error reporting so make your script produce no HTML if it is working fine.

Server migration complete for garfagnana-food and soane.net

I have closed the old server. Some, non-active, sites still need to be loaded on the new server, but I took the decision to complete the move as an incentive to get everything in order. All the domain routing now works, but some of the sites have to be loaded. I am gradually working my way through them.

Server migration

I have taken the plunge and started the migration to a new GoDaddy server (http://72.167.97.186/). New details:
CPU GenuineIntel, Intel(R) Xeon(R)CPU 5148 @ 2.33GHz
Operating system Linux 2.6.9-023stab044.4-smp
Plesk version 8.2.1_build82070918.10 os_FedoraCore 6

I was forever running out of memory on the old one and this will give me more speed and a supported Fedora operating system (Core 6). Also added Plesk 8.2.1, which will give me a bit more functionality over domain hosting, etc.

Transferred my parked domains yesterday.

Will move the active sites over the w/e probably, before closing the old one. Meanwhile all should be as was on the old server.


Now I just need to get to grips with Plesk...

Gallery2 added to soane.net

Great piece of free kit this, which enables you to publish your own photos. LINK

OverLIB incorporated into garfagnana-food

Another great freeware product, thanks to Erik Bosrup. LINK

Google maps integrated into garfagnana-food

What a brilliant application this is. Just could not resist integrating it into the site. It slows the whole thing down a lot though so I have put it a bit more in the background now. LINK