One of the websites I host and operate ran into some problems today with the image upload facility. For some reason it wouldn’t resize any images with an error showing that too much memory was being used. Uploading the same image via a different website I host worked fine, which I found a little strange.

To cut a long story short I managed to get things working again by switching from the inbuilt GD library to Imagick, the PHP extension to ImageMagick. Here’s the code I used to make a thumnail based on the image uploaded.

function create_thumbnail($file, $new_name, $max_side) {
 
	$image = new Imagick($file);
	// Providing 0 forces thumbnailImage to
	// maintain aspect ratio
	$image->thumbnailImage($max_side,0);
 
	$thumbnail = $image->writeImage($new_name);
	$image->destroy(); // Free resources
	if($thumbnail == true) {
		return true;
	} else {
		return "Imagick Error!";
	}
}

It went from about 50 lines of code, to just 13. A pretty good improvement considering it does the same thing!

I’ve lost count how many times I’ve needed to recompile a new version of APC for PHP on my server, so this mainly serves as a reminder on how to do it for next time.

1. Go to http://pecl.php.net/package/APC and find the latest download link at the time.
2. Login via SSH and go into root login via

   su -

3. Navigate to the source folder:

   cd /usr/local/src

4. wget the latest download from the PHP pecl link above. (i.e. wget http://pecl.php.net/get/APC-3.0.15.tgz)
5. Unzip the archive like so:

   gunzip -c APC-3.0.15.tgz | tar xf -

6. Navigate to the APC folder:

   cd APC-3.0.15

7. phpize the APC folder to make the correct configuration file: /usr/bin/phpize
8. Make the configuration file:

   ./configure --enable-apc --enable-apc-mmap --with-apxs --with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config

9. Start the compile:

   make

10. Finish and install:

    make install

11. Edit the php.ini file to enable the APC module based on the location provided from the previous command:

    pico -w /usr/lib/php.ini

12. Finally restart apache to see the changes:

    service httpd restart

The important bits you need to put inside php.ini are the extension call like so:

extension = "apc.so"

You then also need to enable and configure APC to your liking. Here’s my setup:

apc.enabled = 1
apc.shm_size = 64
apc.ttl = 3600
apc.user_ttl = 3600
apc.optimization = 0
apc.filters = "-Gallery.*\.class, wp-cache-config, -mint.php"
apc.include_once_override=1
apc.write_lock=1

Other things you need to take into account is your PHP extension_dir setting. This needs to be set right to be able to load the module correctly above.
You should also bear in mind that /usr/bin/phpize and /usr/bin/php-config could be different for your system setup.

Yesterday a compromised server was used to attempt to get into my box. Thankfully I have an operationally mod_security and a damn fine firewall, that monitors mod_security alerts. This is a vital thing to have, especially if you have any compromisable software running. I do daily and weekly checks of my server to make sure there aren’t any things on here that shouldn’t be.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone whose pretty eagled eyed will notice the new Share This link just next to the comments link on each post. I implemented the Share This plugin by Alex King this morning in the hope of driving some more traffic to the website and allowing visitors to bookmark and posts they find interesting.

It’s quite a subtle integration into the posts, but I didn’t want anything overly obtrusive and ugly and Alex’s plugin does just that. I did change the default icon that shows next to the link as it was a little bulky and frankly quite ugly!
The link also allows you to email posts to people, which kills two birds with one stone.

Today I went ahead and updated PHP and APC to the latest versions. Unfortunately, WordPress and some of its plugins don’t seem to agree too well with either of them.
I rolled back to PHP 5.2.0 and APC 3.0.12p2 for the time being and will keep an eye on the software to see if any changes are made soon.
I did managed to get Suhosin installed though.