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The TotoLink LR1200 is a fairly cheap WiFi access point and 4G/ethernet modem router available in Asia. It's also known as the Zioncom AC1200. It has two web interfaces: a standard interface with all the features available, and a simplified version designed for mobile devices.
By default, phpMyAdmin is missing a number of useful configuration options. When you install it from source, you can set these options by editing /path/to/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php. However, Debian and Ubuntu package up phpMyAdmin and store things in a slightly different place. This makes installation, update and maintenance much more convenient, but does make things slightly more confusing when you want to set custom options.
When reviewing code, a simple first step in checking that it doesn’t include any errors is to run a syntax check. In this post, I outline how to set up tools to scan all the code in a directory for syntax errors, and how to run this scan automatically when committing your code to git. For simplicity’s sake I am assuming that you are running Ubuntu, but the principles apply to any development environment.
The command line version of PHP (package php7.x-cli) allows you to syntax check a single file:
In this post, I describe how to set up spam filtering rules based on the country that an email was sent from, using SpamAssassin. These notes are based on Debian Bookworm, but the principles are very similar for other versions of Debian and Ubuntu. If you run a mail server that primarily only receives mail from a few countries, this guide should be very helpful to you in the fight against spam.
Update: the information below is a bit outdated. As of December 2023, I recommend using https://github.com/phd/chromium-repo instead, as it’s easier to set up and more reliable. Phd’s repository is based on the packages from Linux Mint.
In this post, I provide instructions on setting up automatic WordPress security updates for multiple sites on UNIX-based servers.
The very commonly used mysql_* and ereg* PHP functions were removed in PHP 7. For very large codebases, refactoring the code to remove them just isn't practical. To that end, we have developed a compatibility library to enable existing websites and PHP scripts to keep running under newer PHP versions.
There are fundamental differences between PHP scripts that are run by a web request, and those that are run from the command line. One of the main ones is that the environment settings will be completely different, including the path. Every few years I forget this and it comes back to bite me.
Writing Vietnamese correctly requires diacritics that aren’t commonly used in Western languages. Miss one out and you completely change the meaning of what you’re writing. As I frequently communicate in Vietnamese it’s important to be able to input diacritics, which is a bit of problem since Western keyboards don’t include them. On my own laptop I use IBus to allow me to switch into UniKey mode, but it’s a bit fiddly to set up, and it’s not an option when I’m using a different computer.
Today I had to recover a Debian server after the /var partition was accidentally deleted. All the user generated data (primarily website content and databases) was backed up, and I also had access to a backup copy of the installed package list as generated by dpkg --get-selections. The instructions below don’t go into full detail, but hopefully they will set you on the right track. They should also work for Ubuntu installs.
If this happens to you, don’t panic, and whatever you do, don’t shut down or reboot the server!