Zaemis

I'm changing shared hosting providers for my websites and the sites I manage for clients as Salt City Tech. Most of the sites are basic websites powered by PHP, share a common code base, and store data in MySQL databases. But I've also been taking advantage of the situation to transition the sites from MySQL to SQLite. There are a lot of things that annoy me about SQLite (such as allowing NULLs in primary-key columns , ignoring foreign key constrains, and incomplete ALTER TABLE support ) and a few things that I think are pretty awesome (such as user-defined functions in PHP ). Pragmatically speaking, SQLite will be more convenient for deployment to and backup from the shared hosting environment and the sites' simple storage requirements fall exactly in SQLite's sweet-spot. The transition hasn't been terribly difficult... the biggest obstacle has been configuring a development environment that adequately mirrored the shared hosting deployment environment. I happened ...

PHP's ftp_ssl_connect() function is for SSL-FTP, where as what I need for a client's application is SFTP. Isn't life grand! Well, it's not really too much trouble... PHP can handle that too with functions from the ssh2 PECL extension. I'm just glad I caught it early on instead of at the 11th hour. I figured though I might as well continue my previous post about setting up this project with a brief description on installing ssh2 and testing it to ensure everything is in working order. Installation The ssh2 extension provides bindings to libssh2 which must be installed first on the system. My target platform is CentOS 5.3, so I was able to install libssh2 and libssh2-devel via yum (using the RPMForge repository). yum install libssh2 libssh2-devel The ssh2 extension is available from the pecl.php.net website . There is a minor bug in the current version (0.11.0) which prevents it from compiling against PHP 5.3 so I needed to apply this patch . wget http://remi.fed...

In doing some preliminary research and planning for a client's new project, I determined his current in-house deployment platform would not be sufficient given his requirements. Specifically, the project calls for a moderate amount of URL re-writing and the ability to programmatically FTP files to a remote host. The client is running IIS on Windows Server 2008; I’m not too keen on ISAPI rewrite and IIS Rewrite seems to have fallen off the face of the Internet, and the ftp_ssl_connect() function is only available in PHP if both the ftp module and OpenSSL support are statically built-in so we would have to maintain a build environment for him, too. A LAMP-stack makes more sense. Apache can rewrite URLs with mod_rewrite and compiling PHP is a more supported practice on Linux than it is on Windows. I discussed the obstacles and some possible solutions with the client and he's okay with LAMP. Instead of bringing in more hardware, though, I suggested taking advantage of virtualizat...