755, 666, 777, What does it all mean? I don’t know what it is about this subject but many people are completely baffled by unix permissions, like 777, 666 and 755 particularly if one is used to using a PC or Mac but don’t have any unix or linux background. So why is it important for us? Well the vast majority of web servers run on Linux boxes. These servers assign a specific set of permissions [...]

OK, so Joomla 1.0.x stream is pretty ancient at this stage but there are still a heck of alot of websites running this as their platform. Now it ran perfectly on php 5 but when 5.3 came out it crashed and burned – as did the then current versions of Joomla 1.5! This was eventually fixed in Joomla 1.5.15, but since support for the 1.0 had been removed the older version never did get an [...]

Note this relates to certs for dedicated hosting – shared hosts will sell these transparently. We’ve all created self-signed SSL certs and while these do the job they just don’t cut it from a customer satisfaction point of view. “Your website is down, it keeps complaining about security”. So in this case we need a Trusted cert, verified by a 3rd party authority like Verisign or Comodo. It’s actually quite easy to do but there [...]

Every now and then (once a year only hopefully) one comes across a nasty problem. Well that happened to us a couple of days ago. Corruption of a MySQL Database right down the FRM and MYI files. Even worse it seemed that MySQL’s own data schema was getting progressively more corrupt. Symptoms Databases appearing empty Databases with corrupt tables “MySQL went away” message when entering a table via command line or phpmyadmin The “Next” database [...]

So you’ve gone and developed your website, installed and configured extensions, entered content and built up a membership. You have a wealth of time invested in this project. One day you visit the website and and notice the dreaded “This site contains malware do you want to proceed” notice in your browser or even worse you’re website has been compromised, used to attack other machines and nobody is any the wiser. You and your readership [...]