Sannsack.com

PCI Compliance

dsackr — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 07:07:19 +0000

If you have a server that is involved in eCommerce - you MUST be PCI complaint. Here are a few steps to get a virtual private server running cpanel/whm PCI complaint:

Disable TRACE or TRACK method -

Access your Web Hosting Manager (WHM)
Under Service Configuration, click the link for Apache Configuration
Click the Global Configuration link
The second option is TraceEnable. Set this to OFF.
Restart Apache

Disable weak ciphers -

I logged into my WHM (11.24) > Apache Configuration > Global Configuration, and here is a direct cut and paste:

ALL:!ADH:!NULL:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:-LOW:+SSLv3:+TLSv1

More to come…

iptables – quick how to block a port (and save it)

dsackr — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:11:55 +0000

If you don’t know what iptables are – don’t bother reading this post.

I had a recent issue with the vncserver on my virtual private server – I don’t use the service and wouldn’t have turned it on, however the hosting provided I acquired the vps from included it in their base build, enabled and listening on both ports 5902 and 5903. I turned the service off (using ‘chkconfig vncserver off’). But, ever after that – my server was still responding to ports 5902 and 5903.

Ok – so if its not vncserver – I don’t know what it is. But ‘netstat -tp’ didn’t reveal anything listening on those ports. So rather than waste a lot of time trying to figure it out – I figured I would take the easy route and block the port. This is how I did it:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp –dport 5902 -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp –dport 5903 -j DROP

I derived those commands from here: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-security/29397-closing-ports.html using input from Goran.

Ok – telnet to those ports no longer responds – great! But then I rebooted the server (actually I just restarted iptables using ‘service iptables restart’). Now my server is replying to those ports again. DOH!

I realized I need to save the firewall rules after I ran them. I read a lot about exporting and importing the rules using iptables-save and iptables-restore – but this seemed like overkill. I finally found this: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/red-hat-31/how-to-save-iptables-415929/

‘service iptables save’

Volla – worked like a champ! Hope it helps you!

How to set different prices for each store view in Magento

dsackr — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:15:41 +0000

If you have more than one Magento website (say a wholesale site for retailer clients and a retail site for consumers) you may find yourself wanting to set one price for site A and a different price for site B. Here is how:

Step 1. In the Admin panel, goto System, Configuration, Catolog, then Price.

Step 2. Change Price from Global to Website.

Step 3. You should see “Website” on the price page for the product now, instead of “Global”.

Step 4. For each product you want to set different prices on – select the product, then in the upper left corner you will see the option to chose your store view. Select the first store

Step 5. Set the price for the first store and click “Save and Continue Editing”

Step 6. Select the store view for your second store and set the price for that store

Step 7. Repeat step 6 until all of your store have the prices you want.

WordPress 3.0 is OUT!

dsackr — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:11:03 +0000

And the engine behind sannsack.com – as well as several of my other sites!

If you haven’t upgraded yet – do it today!

How to Make Gmail your Default Email Program in Windows 7

dsackr — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 11:38:37 +0000

Here is something I get asked alot – How do I make GMail my default email program in Windows 7? In Windows 7, you have the option to change your Default Programs to which ever email program you have installed – but GMail isn’t installed on your computer and doesn’t show up in Default Programs.

You could installed GMail Notifier and set it to open gmail for you when an email link is clicked – but there is another way if you are willing to edit the registry. I know this can sound a bit technical, but its not difficult to do. If it does scary you off – then go with the GMail notifier option – otherwise follow these steps:

Right Click on the link below for your browser below
Select Save As
Save to your computer
Find where you saved the file and change the file extension from .txt to .reg
import the registry file to your computer

If step 4 has you hung up – you need to change your folder options to not hide extensions for known file types.

Magento pre-checks – how to install curl, gd, mcrypt, and pdo using cpanel whm – yeah its easy!

dsackr — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:29:48 +0000

I searched for hours and hours after I attempted to install Magento on a godaddy vps only to get this:

Your server does not meet the following requirements in order to install Magento.

The following requirements failed, please contact your hosting provider in order to receive assistance with meeting the system requirements for Magento:

You are missing the curl extension
You are missing the gd extension
You are missing the mcrypt extension
You are missing the pdo_mysql extension
You are missing the pdo extension

The following requirements were successfully met:

You have PHP 5.2.0 (or greater)
Safe Mode is off
You have MySQL 4.1.20 (or greater)
You have the dom extension
You have the hash extension
You have the iconv extension
You have the pcre extension
You have the simplexml extension

After hours of searching I found “pecl install pdo” which worked great to address the pdo and pdo_mysql extension issues. But sadly, “pecl install curl” did nothing (btw, its not supposed to – but I was hopeful). I found a lot of information about updating the php.ini – most of which talked about removing the ; from the lines required to enable curl, gd, and mcrypt. Which I did – then restarted apache, then restarted my server, then rebooted my laptop… ok, the laptop was because I loaded patches to it completely unrelated to my server problem, but why not throw that in there?

I found several posts saying “just run /scripts/easyapache”. Most of these posts assume a certain level of knowledge that I obviously didn’t have. Once I found that I can actually just type “/scripts/easyapache” at an SSH command line (I know I may have just ‘assumed’ a level of knowledge you may not have but keep reading, it gets easy!) I ran easyapache and was presented with a text based menu that made no sense to me. I felt like I was on the right track, but still not there. The forum where I found the easyapache hint (http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=26527) had several comments with questions about what it does and how to use it – but one comment caught my eye by Erwin:

In CPanel 7, you can now do this in WHM by going to the Software section and choosing:

Update Apache

Then choose mcrypt or any other module you want to recompile PHP with.

And it will do so automatically. Similar to easyapache, but easier to use. I upgraded to PHP 4.3.2 just like that with the modules I want.

So I tried that – realizing the post was pretty old and my screens might be very different. They were, but I was able to work it out. I went to

“Main >> Software >> EasyApache (Apache Update)”.
Then I selected the PHP Encryption / E-commerce option.
Then “start customizing based on profile”.
From there I selected Apache 2.2 (I was currently running 2.0),
clicked Next and selected php5, selected build 5.3.2,
scroll to the bottom of the page and click “
“
Now we are COOKING! – you can now select curl, gd, mcrypt, pdo, and a whole host of other options.

After selecting those options, I clicked “
“. Now it goes and goes while building apache with all of the options you selected – NO COMPILING, MAKE, MAKE INSTALL, ETC! It does all of that for you!

I go back to my magento-check.php page and I’m in magento precheck heaven:

Congratulations! Your server meets the requirements for Magento.

You have PHP 5.2.0 (or greater)
Safe Mode is off
You have MySQL 4.1.20 (or greater)
You have the curl extension
You have the dom extension
You have the gd extension
You have the hash extension
You have the iconv extension
You have the mcrypt extension
You have the pcre extension
You have the pdo extension
You have the pdo_mysql extension
You have the simplexml extension

WordPress 2.9 Out – Oh so fine…

dsackr — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 02:57:02 +0000

WordPress 2.9 is supposed to embed video urls simply by pasting the url into its own line in a post – so here goes:

Don’t use WPAU plug-in to upgrade to WordPress 2.7!

dsackr — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:27:35 +0000

I upgraded several of my blogs manually to the newly released WordPress 2.7 and they have worked out very well, however I upgraded one of my blogs using the WPAU plugin and the results were a disaster. Most of the functionality is there, however there have been several buggy screens inside the admin panel – most of the issue appears to be related to the styling of pages (missing images, text based pages, code function names instead of friendly names, etc).

I could be jumping the gun here, since I have only upgraded one blog using the plugin… But I’m not going to chance it with any of my client’s blogs.

WordPress 2.7 is the Microsoft Frontpage for Web2.0

dsackr — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:07:29 +0000

When a co-worker said that earlier today, I must admit I was at first put off. I’m not a frontpage fan and I think frontpage websites look horrible. But then I gave it some thought. Frontpage made creating a website easy and intuitive; it was an amazing product at the time. WordPress makes creating high quality websites easy and intuitive; it is an amazing Web2.0 product.

I’ve been using wordpress since version 2.0 and there have been major improvements over the years – but version 2.7 takes the cake! The new admin panel is a great improvement to an already amazing product. There are many features I love about the new version, but my personal favorite is the ability to upgrade the core from the admin panel. In the previous version they introduced the ability to automatically upgrade plugins – a feature that worked most of the time for me. But if you wanted to update wordpress itself, you either manually upgraded or you installed the wpau plugin. Now its a couple of clicks from the admin panel.

The admin panel itself is more user friendly than ever before; a newly added navigation bar, a dashboard that displays relavent information, a quickpress option to brain dump a post faster than ever, and the ability to edit metadata without having to navigate through the posts themselves – just to name a few of the improvements.

WordPress is quickly positioning itself to become a household name as a leading provider of Web2.0 websites.

How to get emails from yourself using gmail and pop3

dsackr — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 08:31:23 +0000

Google rocks in many ways – including gmail… but after moving a few of my clients to google hosted mail (client@clientsdomainname.com hosted using gmail servers), I ran into a snag. Its not actually something I would have expected to ever hear… The actually call went like this:

Client: “I’m not getting all of my mail”

me: “Ok, what do you mean?”

Client: “I mean, not all of my mail is coming to my outlook”

me: “how do you know you are missing mail”

Client: “When I email myself, I don’t get the email – so I’m not getting all of my mail”

The first thing I did was log into the website and looked at the email online – and all of the emails the client sent to himself were there (I think there were over 10). I can understand why the client came to the conclusion that email was missing, but it turns out it was only email from him to him.

Google has decided that you don’t actually want to get emails from yourself using pop3. If you want email from yourself, either log into the website or use IMAP. Well, my clients like Outlook, so the website is out, and IMAP puts their email in a new folder structure below the personal folders where they are used to getting it – not to mention the how the folder structure works with the label system gmail: my clients just don’t like it. So, it has to be pop and it has to be outlook – and it has to work, including emails to themselves. I was surprised at how many of my clients called with the same issue. I thought “Wow, these guys like to talk to themselves alot”…

Anyway… the answer is simple: when setting up outlook, you have to use “Recent Mode”. Your next question, how do I do that? Simple, but not intuitive – put “recent:” infront of your email address when you setup outlook. ***Warning*** if you may end up with duplicate email from the last 30 days of email when you make this change – but if you want email from you to you using pop and gmail – you don’t have a choice.

So, your email address in the outlook email account setting page should look like this: