Archive for July 13th, 2007

Techy: Discontinuation of PHP4

July 13th, 2007

I’ve already blogged about 13 facts about Friday the 13th which is paraskevidekatriaphobia or just triskaidekaphobia if you only fear the number 13. But Friday the 13th of July 2007 will go down as a “notable date” for some web developers – it’s the day that the End of Life of PHP4 was announced.

PHP4 as a programming language will become discontinued on the 31st of December this year – so if you’ve got an essential program which depends on PHP4 – contact the developers to make it PHP5 compatible now (after all, PHP5 has been out 3 years and they are now working on PHP6!). Ok, some people will be stuck (if I remember correctly, osCommerce doesn’t work brilliantly on PHP5 but I may be mistaken), but unfortunately that’s life…

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Posted in Net: Techy: PHP

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Techy: Setting up Private Key Authentication in Linux for Rsync

July 13th, 2007

If you wish to be able to automatically log in from one (server a) to another (server b), or you wish to setup rsync so that you can automatically send your backups from “server a” to the remote backup server “server b”, then the following steps should help in the configuration of this:

  • Login to server “A” via SSH as root
  • See if an RSA encryption key already exists by typing the following command:
    cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
    If the key does NOT exist (i.e. you do not receive any output or the system reports “No such file or directory”), then you’ll need to generate an RSA encryption key using the command:
    ssh-keygen -t rsa -N ''
    (note: those are two single quotes and NOT a double quote)
    You’ll then be prompted where to save the key (it should auto-suggest something like /root/.ssh/id_rsa which you should accept)
  • Now you’ll need to copy the RSA encryption key to the remote server (server B). Still via SSH on server A”, enter the following commands (replacing serverb.example.com with the name/IP address of server B, and entering server B’s password where prompted):
    ssh serverb.example.com
    mkdir .ssh
    exit
    scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@serverb.example.com:/root/.ssh/remotekey
    ssh root@serverb.example.com
    cd .ssh
    cat remotekey >> authorized_keys

    exit

  • Now typing “ssh root@serverb.example.com” from server A should automatically log you in.

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Posted in Net: Techy: Linux

News: BBC News: Woman Blames Sat Nav for accident

July 13th, 2007

As I’m in the process of slowing shutting down other sites I’ve worked on (due to time constraints), I’m reposting them here. Here’s an article from the 12th of May 2007 from “Treble R News” which was going to be a Register-esque general news site.

“A 20 year old students car was wrecked by a train after she followed her sat nav system onto a railway track”, BBC News South West reports.
» Read more: News: BBC News: Woman Blames Sat Nav for accident

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Posted in Life: News Commentary