Articles

Published September 24th, 2011 at 11:32 AM. by Joe Prochazka

This post covers the set up of XDebug for use in debuging PHP using IIS 7 with PHP installed using FastCGI. This post does not cover the installation and configuration of IIS 7 and PHP only what to do to enable XDebug in this environment. If you have not yet installed Microsoft Internet Information Services(IIS) 7 or have yet to set up PHP on IIS 7 you may wish to check out the post I made earlier entitled Setting Up IIS 7 and PHP Using FastCGI in a Microsoft Window Environment. That post...

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Published September 24th, 2011 at 1:25 PM. by Joe Prochazka

Setting up and managing PHP in a Microsoft Windows environment under Internet Information Services 7 or IIS7 is a fairly easy task when using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. The following post will walk you through enabling the IIS 7 windows feature along with FastCGI. Afterwards we will use the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to install PHP and the PHP Manager IIS addin. Once finished you will have IIS 7 running PHP using FastCGI as well as an easy way to enable, disable and add...

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Published September 12th, 2011 at 11:46 AM. by Joe Prochazka

The other day I moved a clients existing Magento powered ecommerce site from Apache to nginx. The following is the configuration file I used to run the application under nginx.
The site is running flawlessly using this configuration and the memory drain caused by Magento under Apache seems to be somewhat less then it used to be meaning I am no longer having to restart the Apache httpd service as I had in the past when things got gummed up be the resource hungry application know as Magento....

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Published September 9th, 2011 at 10:51 AM. by Joe Prochazka

This is an update to a quite older post that used to be on my blog. Looking over Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools I noticed there was still traffic coming in to view the older post and receiving a 404 error instead of the information they were looking for. So I decided to sit down update what I remeber to be a very outdated post going back to the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta days with a more recent up to date version including instruction for manual installation as well as...

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Published July 19th, 2011 at 11:38 AM. by Joe Prochazka

The following is a quick and dirty email I was placed in charge of sending to my current employers customer base. When writing it the email was meant to put as bluntly as possible the consequences of using weak passwords just after having two clients just this week being burnt by using passwords such as “12345″ or “mydaughtersname1″. The following was the email I sent out basically using the fairly simple easy for a layman to understand guidelines found within a great document I would...

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Published July 1st, 2011 at 11:45 AM. by Joe Prochazka

This post is about configuring nginx to run wordpress. The actual setup of WordPress remains the same as with any other server so I will not cover that in this post. For instruction on how to setup WordPress I suggest reading the documentation regarding WordPress installation contained within the WordPress Codex at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress.

The main difference between running WordPress on a server such as Apache is how the rewrites work. below is a working...

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Published June 28th, 2011 at 12:04 PM. by Joe Prochazka

In my previous post I covered the installation of nginx, PHP-FPM and MySQL on Ubuntu. In this post I will cover the installation of APC and Memcached onto the server. As before I kept to the use of of packages located on the official Ubuntu repository in order to keep upgrading and maintainance headaches to a minimum. Also before these are the step I took on an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) installation. However you should be able to follow the same steps with any older or newer...

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Published June 28th, 2011 at 11:13 AM. by Joe Prochazka

In my opinion File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a dated protocol which no administrator in their right mind should ever allow to run on any server they are in charge of administrating. FTP was never a protocol designed to be secure and just as Telnet to access remote servers was replaced long ago so should FTP. I will not go into the many weaknesses of FTP security wise when used over the Internet but I am sure if you are reading this you already understand there is a huge risk allowing such a...

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Published June 28th, 2011 at 1:12 PM. by Joe Prochazka

(This post was updated to reflect the default file system paths used by Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. If you are using an older version of Ubuntu you should see the old paths and where to change them noted in the instructions for the step you are on.)

This weekend I decided after reading into the speed gains associated with moving from Apache to nginx to go ahead and fire up a new server and attempt to configure it to run nginx along with PHP-FPM, APC and Memcached. I must admit I was not expecting...

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