Category Archives: Work

PHP xdiff installation in Linux

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Ok… I’ve been trying to get this working for several days and have finally made it work. XDiff is a brilliant diffing utility for PHP but requires you to install it as an extension. Before you are able to do the main part of this you need to install the libxdiff libraries. This is the part that took me some time to get working.

Ok here is the part that has taken me the time… libxdiff. To install this you need to do the following:
cd /usr/src
wget http://www.xmailserver.org/libxdiff-0.22.tar.gz
tar -xzf libxdiff-0.22.tar.gz
cd libxdiff-0.22
./configure
make
make install

This will get you libxdiff installed. The next part is then simple. Install the php extension using the following:
pecl install xdiff

When you have this installed you should then be able to use xdiff from within PHP. See the php manual for more instructions: http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.xdiff.php

CentOS Kernel update failure

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After upgrading our Linux Kernel to version to 2.6.18-194 we found our selves having some problems with the Kernel booting. It was failing to mount the root file system. After several hours with google I finally stumbled across a KB post from microsoft to fix the problem.

Apparently the problem is arising because of the Linux IC components we have insatalled for hyper-v. This was stopping the kernel from booting. The post it’s self explains what to do to stop the problem arising before upgrading the kernel but I can assure that this works when applied post upgrade as well. Here are the steps…

  1. Boot into the previous installed kernel and login…
  2. Follow the instruction in this article… http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2387594
  3. Finally boot into the new kernel

The problem I was having has gone away so hopefully this will work for you as well.

Micrsoft Connection Manager Administration Toolkit

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Have you ever had to setup a VPN for your organisation and constantly have to add routing rules to the client computers so they access other internal subnets over the VPN? For example I have a network in my house that is in the address range 192.168.1.x. From my home PC I want to VPN to work and access the following “work” subnets: 192.168.11.x, 192.168.12.x, 192.168.21.x and 192.168.22.x.

 

The easy one on this list is the first (192.168.11.x) as this is the subnet that is connected to (the vpn server). The problem occurs when accessing the 192.168.12.x etc subnets. The quick way to access these is to add a simple rule to windows routing… something like “route add 192.168.12.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.201.254 if 34” or the appropriate values.

 

This is great for a one off access but as soon as the VPN is disconnected these rules are lost so every time the VPN is connected you have to re-add the rules. This really gets boring. On vista this becomes a pain as you have to elevate your command prompt to actually be able to do this. Also the IF value at the end of the command changes!

 

The answer to this problem is a little better in the long term. You can use the Microsoft Connection Manager Administrators Toolkit which allows you to create a connection profile. These allow you to determine a set of rules that will get generated and added to the routing tables automatically on connection of the VPN. Even better is the fact that you can obtain a file to generate the rules from a web server so you can centralise the management of the rules and update them easily.

 

It’s a bit of a pain to get the profile generated correctly and I’m still having some problems with it. Namely the fact that my new VPN is becoming the default gateway and all the traffic is having to go through this! A way around this is to add a rule at the end of the previously mentioned file that gives the command “REMOVE_GATEWAYS”. This removes the VPN as the default gateway. The problem is though that the connection is setting my default gateway to have a high metric so it’s never taking any traffic over it at all!

 

I’ll hopefully post again when I have this one sorted but it appears that several people have had the same problem so we will see how it works out!

 

 

Planning…

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We’re currently planning some work for the next few weeks and my god it’s busy! I thought I was going to have an easy few weeks with me on holiday for a week, then Mark and Jonathan away for 2 weeks… not such joy! I’ve got a list as long as my arm to complete. All quite substantial things as well.

 

The list includes things such as changing our checkout system, getting Quizical (www.quizical.co.uk) ready for release (which still has some work to go on it) and more importantly getting some idea of the Zend Framework MVC engine to convert an existing product into this framework to make it easier to work on in the future!

 

I think my holiday in Egypt starting on Sunday will need repeating after all this! :-s