PHPNW 2011 is approching

Last year I wrote a brief post about my first trip to the Manchester based PHP developer conference, PHPNW10. It’s now almost a year later and this years conference is just 1 month away so I think it’s about time I did a little plug for them and try to convince anyone that stumbles upon this post to buy a ticket and attend.

PHPNW is a user group meetup of PHP developers based in Manchester, with the aim of sharing experiences and improving knowledge of all things PHP (and other related technologies). The group meet the first Tuesday of the month for a 40 min or so talk on the speakers chosen topic. They held their first conference in 2008 and have had one each year since. Find out more on the conference About page. Read the rest of this entry »

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PHPNW Conference 2010

Last weekend I attended a PHP developer conference here in Manchester hosted by PHPNW.
PHPNW is a community of web developers, web designers and anyone else interested in PHP, from the North West of England, who come together once a month to talk with similar like minded people and have a pint or two. The sessions normally have one or two speakers and I recommend everyone pop down if they can. Read the rest of this entry »

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Turn off open_basedir in Plesk

I’m adding this post, mainly for my own reference but thought it may be of interest for others with the same problem.

The problem

Plesk unhelpfully ignores the base url set in the php.ini file with its own settings, but these settings are not configurable from the control panel.

The Solution

Create a “vhost.conf” file for the domain – e.g “/var/www/vhosts/<your.domain.tld>/conf/”

Add the following to the file

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/<your.domain.tld>/httpdocs>
php_admin_value open_basedir none
</Directory>

Then you just need to rebuild the plesk config files and restart apache

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -a
/sbin/service httpd restart

Job done :)

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PHPNW Conference 2010 is approching

phpnw09 PHP Conference 10/10/2009

I just wanted to do a little shout out to any developers, to say that the early bird ticket deadline is fast approaching for this years PHPNW conference.

Tickets have been on sale for a while now at £58 (ex VAT) but this will go up on the 12th August to £75 so if your thinking of going, now’s the time to get your ticket.

For more information or to book your ticket goto http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw10/.

Update [5/8/10]:
FYI The early bird ticket closing date has been extended to Saturday 4th September.

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preventing SPAM

Since I moved to my VPS, one of the biggest problems I’ve had is with spam. Not just with my email account but everyone who’s email accounts Im hosting on the VPS have all seen a sharp increase in spam emails.

On the reseller server I had access to grey-listing and SpamAssassin to filter mail as it arrived and I got maybe 2 or 3 a week, but the day after I moved onto the vps this shot up to between 20 and 50 a day!  I have my emails pushed straight to my phone as well so this fast became a bit of a pain.

My VPS did come with SpamAssassin pre-installed as part of Plesk but due to the licence I have installed I couldn’t use it so this caused two problems, 1) emails are not filtered for spam and 2) SpamAssassin is using up precious memory while not actually helping.

The first thing I did was to turn off SpamAssassin, it was using a lot of memory as even tho it wasn’t filtering any mail  it was still scanning every message that arrived on the server, On advice of my hosting providers tech support I decided not to un-install it in case it caused problems so I just stopped the service from running and then disabled it from auto starting on system reboot to preventing it restarting if I ever need to reboot the server.

I then tried to find the grey-listing software used on my old reseller server, this seemed to work really well so I wanted it on my server too. Support told me they were using a script put together by Brent Meisher written to work specifically with Plesk but  unfortunately the repo had been removed and I couldn’t download the files.

I was speaking with a support engineer about it and he mentioned a new tool he was playing with called SpamDyke and how it was looking promising as a replacement to their current grey-listing solution, so I decided to give it a try.

The good news is, that since I started writing this blog post, SpamDyke has been added into the atomic repositories, so to install it is as simple as using apt get or yum. Configuration is just as simple, the default settings are actually quite effective and I’ve been using them for two weeks and haven’t received a single piece of spam.

All the information you need can be found on the SpamDyke website and the README file is really useful.
This is something I defiantly recommend to everyone who is running their own mail server.

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Posted in CSS, Javascript, Other, PHP, SEO | 1 Comment »