I’ve been getting a lot of bounced emails lately due to a client doing mass mailing with most of the recipient emails either does not exist or server is unreachable and it’s clogging the server’s mail queue. The server is using WHM/Cpanel that manages all the tweaks and settings of the server.

Below is a guide on how to put a limit on the number of outgoing emails allowed to be sent from the server per user, per hour.

Login to your WHM account, under Server Configuration, look for Tweak Settings then look for “Max hourly emails per domain” section and enter the number of outgoing emails you want to process per hour for every domain.

Once you have the number of emails to process per hour set, go to “Mail” tab and look for the “The percentage of email messages (above the account’s hourly maximum) to queue and retry for delivery” and set it to how many percent of those that exceeds the number of emails to process per hour be placed on queue for delivery the next hour.

Save your changes and restart your mail services.
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mod_ruid2 is an SuExec module for Apache 2.x web server based on mod_ruid and mod_suid2 which is one of the PHP types supported by Kloxo web control panel for secure environment.

There are two main operating modes for mod_ruid2, namely stat and config.

Config mode is the default mode used by mod_ruid2 wherein you define the uid and gid that will be used as effective user for the executed/read file.

Stat mode is used when you have multiple sites owned by different users and every file being read or executed must be run through its effective user or group. This is commonly used in virtual hosting environment.

When you install Kloxo, mod_php_ruid2 is also installed together with other PHP types like suphp. In this tutorial we will be setting up mod_php_ruid2 for a shared hosting server or a virtual hosting environment using Apache 2 web server.

Let’s configure first our mod_php_ruid2 to use Stat mode by setting “RMode config” to “RMode stat” in our ruid2 config file

vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/ruid2.conf

LoadModule ruid2_module modules/mod_ruid2.so

<ifmodule mod_ruid2.c>
    RMode stat
    RDefaultUidGid apache apache
    RUidGid apache apache
    RGroups apache
</ifmodule>

Save and exit from the editor then restart your Apache web server.

service httpd restart

Now, let’s setup our Kloxo to use mod_php_ruid2 by going to your server’s “Webserver config” . Under the PHP type section, select mod_php_ruid2 and under “Fix ownership and permissions”, select “fix-ALL”. Lastly, click on the Update button and wait for the operation to be completed.

When it’s finished, try to execute or access a file while running “top” command, you should see that the effective user of the executed file is used by the Apache web server.

That’s it, you should have the mod_php_ruid2 setup and configured. Please do not hesitate to drop your comments and suggestions below.
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Here’s a short note on setting up swfmill on CentOS linux.

swfmill is an xml2swf and swf2xml processor with import functionalities.

It’s most common use is the generation of asset libraries containing images (PNG and JPEG), fonts (TTF) or other SWF movies for use with MTASC- or haXe-compiled ActionScript, although swfmill can be used to produce both simple and complex SWF structures.

Download and Install swfmill

wget -c http://swfmill.org/releases/swfmill-0.3.2.tar.gz

Untar the downloaded package and change to its directory.

cd swfmill-0.3.2
./configure

configure: error: Package requirements (libxslt) were not met:

No package 'libxslt' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables XSLT_CFLAGS
and XSLT_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.

If you encounter an error related to libxslt then you need to install it.

yum -y install libxslt libxslt-devel

Brightness Settings
Setting it to a not too bright when in use will help lower down the iPhone5 battery consumption. Go to Settings > Brightness > then move the slider as far left as you can while still being able to see everything.

Lock it Up
When not in use, be sure to lock it to save battery (click the top button for sleep/wake) or auto lock your iPhone5. Go to Settings > General > Auto-Lock.

Close applications
Leaving applications active will drain the battery even when the iPhone 5 is in the standby state. Make sure to close it after using.

Turn off unused networking
Turn 3G access, data roaming or Wi-Fi OFF when not in used. Go to Settings > General > Network and select options there.
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From this “leaked” photo, it appears that HTC’s new flagship smartphone looks similar to the iPhone 5, the dimensions at least compared to the much bigger and wider current Android phones in the market. Whether this is the HTC M7 or not, we will definitely find out on February 19,2012 at the HTC press event in New York City.

Meanwhile, here’s a quick comparison between the iPhone5 and Blackberry Z10.
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One of the features I like most in Mikrotik RouterOS is the ability to run custom scripts that will enable you to automate some things on router side. In a workplace where “bring your own device” is practiced, being able to control the registration of these devices on your network is very important especially for mobile devices - laptops, tablets and smartphones.

It’s becoming harder to control these device especially if they are in large number. Smartphone can be just placed inside a bag or pocket while it automatically connect through your access points where wireless key is known to the user and download unnecessary files on the internet thus wasting network bandwidth while increasing network security risk.

Now, if you happen to have a Mikrotik RouterOS in your network and is facing the same dilemma then probably the script below will help you solve it or least get you started on a better solution.

# Written by: Rex Cortez
# Tested to work on RouterOS 5.19

:foreach i in=[/ip dhcp-server lease find dynamic=yes] do={
   :local dynamicIP [/ip dhcp-server lease get $i address];
   :local dynamicMAC [/ip dhcp-server lease get $i mac-address];
   :local dynamicHOST [/ip dhcp-server lease get $i host-name];
   :local macfound [/ip firewall filter find src-mac-address=$dynamicMAC];

    :if ($macfound != "") do={
        :log info ($dynamicMAC. " already filtered")
    } else= {
        /ip firewall filter add chain=forward src-mac-address=$dynamicMAC action=drop comment=($dynamicHOST . " - " . $dynamicMAC . " Unregistered device")
        :log info ("Added " . $dynamicMAC. " to firewall filter")
    }
}

Basically, the script will look for dynamic ip addresses inside the dhcp server leases table and search their mac address in the firewall filter table. If it’s not yet blocked then it will create an entry blocking the mac address to prevent it from sending traffic through your network.

To automatically execute the script periodically, you will need to add it on the scheduler, see example below:

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I recently got a linux server running on a cloud and migrated few of my sites including this site. However, I forgot that the main page of this site requires DB package to be installed which can be installed through PEAR, and to cut the story short I end up installing PEAR just to get the DB package installed. Below is how to install PEAR on Linux specifically on Ubuntu 12.04.

wget  http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar

sudo php -q go-pear.phar

Below is a suggested file layout for your new PEAR installation.  To
change individual locations, type the number in front of the
directory.  Type 'all' to change all of them or simply press Enter to
accept these locations.

 1. Installation base ($prefix)                   : /usr
 2. Temporary directory for processing            : /tmp/pear/install
 3. Temporary directory for downloads             : /tmp/pear/install
 4. Binaries directory                            : /usr/bin
 5. PHP code directory ($php_dir)                 : /usr/share/pear
 6. Documentation directory                       : /usr/docs
 7. Data directory                                : /usr/data
 8. User-modifiable configuration files directory : /usr/cfg
 9. Public Web Files directory                    : /usr/www
10. Tests directory                               : /usr/tests
11. Name of configuration file                    : /etc/pear.conf

1-11, 'all' or Enter to continue:
Beginning install...
Configuration written to /etc/pear.conf...
Initialized registry...
Preparing to install...
installing phar:///root/go-pear.phar/PEAR/go-pear-tarballs/Archive_Tar-1.3.7.tar...
installing phar:///root/go-pear.phar/PEAR/go-pear-tarballs/Console_Getopt-1.3.0.tar...
installing phar:///root/go-pear.phar/PEAR/go-pear-tarballs/PEAR-1.9.4.tar...
installing phar:///root/go-pear.phar/PEAR/go-pear-tarballs/Structures_Graph-1.0.4.tar...
installing phar:///root/go-pear.phar/PEAR/go-pear-tarballs/XML_Util-1.2.1.tar...
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Archive_Tar-1.3.7
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Console_Getopt-1.3.0
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Structures_Graph-1.0.4
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/XML_Util-1.2.1
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/PEAR-1.9.4
PEAR: Optional feature webinstaller available (PEAR's web-based installer)
PEAR: Optional feature gtkinstaller available (PEAR's PHP-GTK-based installer)
PEAR: Optional feature gtk2installer available (PEAR's PHP-GTK2-based installer)
PEAR: To install optional features use "pear install pear/PEAR#featurename"

The 'pear' command is now at your service at /usr/bin/pear

** The 'pear' command is not currently in your PATH, so you need to
** use '/usr/bin/pear' until you have added
** '/usr/bin' to your PATH environment variable.

Run it without parameters to see the available actions, try 'pear list'
to see what packages are installed, or 'pear help' for help.

For more information about PEAR, see:

  http://pear.php.net/faq.php
  http://pear.php.net/manual/

Thanks for using go-pear!

Once you have successfully installed PEAR, you can start installing PEAR packages by invoking pear.

pear install DB

That’s about it, let me know should you encounter installation issues with PEAR.

Here’s a short simple script on how to fetch URL and sending post data on Python.

#!/path/to/python

import urllib

params = urllib.urlencode({'param1': value1, 'param2': value2})
response = urllib.urlopen("http://www.somewebsite.com/post-data-file.php", params)
html = response.read()

print(html)

That easy

I’ve been looking for a free dynamic dns service that I can use to resolve the ip address that is dynamically assigned by my internet service provider to my home router. The search led me to DNSQuackie, which provide just what I needed on a dynamic dns service, a reliable and free dynamic dns.

It also supports both dynamic and static ip name resolutions. For routers that support custom DDNS entry, you can use DNSQuackie directly through its direct authentication interface.

DNSQuackie’s dynamic dns client is easy to use and automatically detect ip changes and send that changes to the server without having to logout and relogin.

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What is Memcached?
An open source high-performance distributed memory object caching system.

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

How to install Memcached?
Below is a guide on how to install memcached on your server.

Download the memcached package.

wget http://memcached.googlecode.com/files/memcached-1.4.15.tar.gz
tar -vxzf memcached-1.4.15.tar.gz
./configure

checking for gcov... /usr/bin/gcov
checking for main in -lgcov... yes
checking for library containing clock_gettime... -lrt
checking for library containing socket... none required
checking for library containing gethostbyname... none required
checking for libevent directory... configure: error: libevent is required.  You can get it from http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent/

      If it's already installed, specify its path using --with-libevent=/dir/

If the system is not able to find the libevent and libevent libraries during the configuration time then you need to install both libevent and libevent-devel packages.

yum -y install libevent libevent-devel

Once memcached is installed, you need to install a memcache client to be able to access the memcached server.

pecl install memcache

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