Category Archives: Sys Admin

Material related to systems administration.

PHP ini file user_agent configuration option

Posted on by
32

Today I discovered the user_agent php.ini configuration option. Basically it allows you to specify the user agent PHP uses when it sends HTTP requests for files. I was screen scraping some data from Wikipedia (processing URI schemes) and it was replying with a 403 error, presumably because they’ve banned the default PHP user agent. Anyway I just changed my user agent to a copy of my one from Firefox and things started working. Pretty handy option!

How To Set Cron to Run Every 5 Minutes

Posted on by
29

Thanks to this handy document How To Set Cron to Run Every 5 Minutes I now my crontab configured so that my jj5-test repo gets updated every five minutes. It’s the sort of thing I generally do in a post-commit hook, but in this case that won’t work owing to the way the servers are configured (the files are in my account and not owned by the www-data user the commit-hook runs as).

So to configure cron I issued the command:

 $ crontab -e

And then to update my svn working copy:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/5 * * * * cd /home/jj5/web/test && svn update > /dev/null

How to open file links in Firefox 1.5 and above

Posted on by
36

Found some instructions about How to open file links in Firefox 1.5 and above and I’m going to try it out just as soon as I can reset my browser.

Basically you add something like the following to your user.js file which is in C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[Profile]\user.js.

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "http://www.example.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

Internet explorer support for file URIs

Posted on by
1

The URI file://bender-xp/C$/ works in an anchor tag in IE8 to open the \\bender-xp\C$ file share on my network. In this case bender-xp was the name of my local machine but it works for remote file shares too (I tested it to a Samba share on another box).

Unfortunately my version of Firefox (version 9.0.1) doesn’t support this.

File upload error – unable to create a temporary file in Unknown on line 0

Posted on by
38

I was working with phpMyAdmin and I got the following error:

 File upload error - unable to create a temporary file in Unknown on line 0

The problem was that the upload_tmp_dir setting in my php.ini file was specified twice. Once up the top of the file where I was editing it, and then later in the file where I didn’t see it. So the setting I wanted wasn’t being applied. If you get this error double check you’ve only got one setting for upload_tmp_dir.