As I said before – I can’t imagine working without Zend Studio now. So I decided to install server part of the package on one of my Debian powered servers.

So here we go. First we have to download correct package. As you can see on Zend’s site you have wide choice of versions:

-r– 1 25335043 Jan 15 17:20 ZendStudioServer-5.1.0a-Windows-i386.exe
-r– 1 23302044 Jan 15 17:21 ZendStudioServer-5.1.0a-darwin7.8-ppc.tar.gz
-r– 1 21371695 Jan 15 17:23 ZendStudioServer-5.1.0a-freebsd5.4-i386.tar.gz
-r– 1 22451335 Jan 15 17:21 ZendStudioServer-5.1.0a-linux-glibc21-i386.tar.gz
-r– 1 24682987 Jan 15 17:21 ZendStudioServer-5.1.0a-linux-glibc23-x86_64.tar.gz
-r– 1 23703327 Jan 15 17:21 ZendStudioServer-5.1.0a-sunos5.8-sparc.tar.gz

So I downloaded one

comp# wget -c http://downloads…..-glibc21-i386.tar.gz

and then as the README file says

comp# cd ZendStudioServer-5.1.0a-linux-glibc21-i386
comp# ./install-tty

All ther rest of the process was quick and easy with one note: when the instalator was looking for a php.ini fond one in /usr/lib directory.

Trying to determine the version of PHP.
Please wait… (this may take a few seconds)

Detecting … \ [100%]

Confirm the location of your php.ini file [/usr/local/lib]: /etc/php5/apache

So remember to make sure which php.ini is your Apache using and ajust that path accordingly. If you are not sure – call the phpinfo() function on any of your sites and check. It can save your day :-)

Technorati Tags: Zend Studio, Debian, linux

I think almost all programmers, and web developers aren’t any different kind of them, come at one point to the situation when they have to build their work environment. From what you can see on various web sites usually they divide into two groups:

• Vim advocates
• IDE fans

I have to admit that for a long time I belonged to the first part – I was using basic text editor, all I needed was syntax coloring and ftp features. Then one day I started to work for Foothold and they wanted me to use Zend Studio. They even were so generous that they provided the license at no cost to me :-).

At the beginning it was pretty hard to get used to that system. It was written in Java. As you know the only advantage of Java (especially on slower machines) is it’s cross-platform nature. It took me almost three months to finally get all thing working, including the finally bought secondary monitor and faster computer with more RAM (if you don’t have at least 768MB it will freeze from time to time). But now the work is almost a pleasure.

More – I can’t imagine developing ANY more complicated site (like CMS or mentioned above A.W.A.R.D.S system) without the variable watchers, breakpoints, step by step debugging.

It’s like Polish way of driving cars – everybody prefer stick shift until they actually try the automatic one.

Technorati Tags: IDE, text editor, Foothold, Zend Studio

As I needed to have my home HVAC server always reachable and keeping in mind that it’s on a dial-up connection (dynamic IP) I decided to build virtual private network. The main goal is to get the home computer visible from the server as it was in local network. Don’t worry, it’s much easier than it seems. Thanks to detailed HOWTO it took me less than 1h to build working connection.

As it’s to easy to do and to long to describe I won’t post detailed description. Just go to the howto and follow the instructons step by step.

I’m using ISPConfig on one of my servers. It’s not the best option availabe on the market, but it’s free, fast, and works on Debian 3.1 out of the box. Which is important as I’m the debian advocate when it comes to choosing distro for server. There are only some minor things which bugs me. One of them is the fact, that the system don’t allow users to log in to their IMAP/POP3 accounts with full email address as a login name. That way becomes more and more popular and many clients were asking “why do I have to remember additional login to check my email”. That is a good question when you keep in mind that bundled webmail client allows to log in using full address.

I solved this problem some time ago. Today while doing small system conversion I run on a problem with a need to authenticate smtp senders. The thing is that I had virtual users (in the db) which were unseen from the system level. Yes I know – there is a lot of helps on the Internet with that little small problem – non of them worked as should (read: didn’t work at all in my configuration). Solution – as always – turned to be compilation from 5-6 different pieces taken out from support lists, faq and documentation.

Below little help (mainly for me in case I need it in the future):

/etc/postfix/sasl/smtpd.conf:

pwcheck_method: saslauthd
mech_list: plain login

/etc/pam.d/smtp:

auth sufficient pam_mysql.so user=xxxx passwd=xxxx host=localhost db=database table=table usercolumn=user passwdcolumn=pass crypt=1

auth sufficient pam_unix_auth.so

account sufficient pam_mysql.so user=xxxx passwd=xxxx host=localhost db=database table=table usercolumn=user passwdcolumn=pass crypt=1

account sufficient pam_unix_acct.so

Some additional information:

1. line 2 and 4 are backup authentication source for shadow – in case we want to auth real system users
2. crypt can take:
   0 – plain text
   1 – crypt()’ed passwords
   2 – md5’ed passwords