So it’s Friday and I decided to start a new tradition of letting everyone know how much spare time I have on my hands nowadays. Here are the sexy sites of the week:

.::0×000000.com::.

If I was ever going to pose nude on a website, this would be the one. Well, aside from all the other ones. So yea, if you want to see some true hacking action, mozy on over to this guy’s site and take some lessons from the master. At least that’s what I called him last night.

Just kidding…(please don’t sue me)

.::ejabs.com::.

I think the whole two brain cells I have left get smarter every time I go to Matt’s site. I don’t quite know how to categorize his site…it’s like the jellybean jar of blogs. He’s actually hosted on one of our servers too, which means that there’s a 78.4% chance that his blog is having sex with mine behind our backs.

.::ilovejackdaniels.com::.

Like most Italians, I hate Jack Daniels. But if they made a liquor called ‘Dave Child’ I’d be all swigging the whole bottle. Ok, that sounded a little less dirty in my head. While you’re there, check out Dave’s other blog, geek-fitness.com. No, I’m not calling you fat.

.::thesneeze.com::.

To be honest, I’m not a big fanatic about his actual blog part, but the real gold is in the Steve, Don’t Eat It! section, where Steve randomly decides to just put things in his mouth that really don’t belong there. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he learned it from her.

I saw on this one site where you can upload a picture of yourself and it’ll match you with celebrities and stuff. Out of curiosity I uploaded one of my pictures to find out who I look like. If you want your own, just go to myheritage.com

Since cPanel 11 came out I’ve been getting a ton of emails from people who are currently using my cPanel Automated Backup script asking if it’s compatible with the x3 theme. If your host is using cPanel 10 or 11 running on monsoon, x, x2, or x3, the script will work. You just have to make sure you have the theme set right in the config:

$skin = “x3″;

This is probably one of the two things that drove me crazy over the last two weeks. The first was trying to get cPanel to stop being such a MySQL nazi, the second was getting Sphinx installed into MySQL 5.1 for one of the clients. I’ve installed it with 5.0 on Ubuntu before, but 5.1 with cPanel can be pretty torturous. After talking to the developer who was able to fill in the blanks, I’ve decided to write my own documentation on how to install Sphinx as a dynamic MySQL plugin for an existing MySQL 5.1 installation.

Before we start...

You need MySQL 5.1 installed to use the plugin feature. If you’re running on cPanel or other version-dependent software it’s a really really bad idea to install MySQL from source, so you’ll probably want to read this as a guide to upgrading via RPM. Also, this walkthrough is specific to MySQL 5.1.20 (beta), since that’s the latest release out at the time of this writing.

You also need to have root access, and a decent knowledge of Linux and MySQL.

Download the Sphinx binaries and MySQL 5.1.20 patch:

wget http://sphinxsearch.com/downloads/sphinx-0.9.7.tar.gz
tar -xvzf sphinx-0.9.7.tar.gz
cd sphinx-0.9.7/mysqlse/
wget http://v-nessa.net/imh_files/sphinxse097-mysql5120.patch

patch -p1 < sphinxse097-mysql5120.patch

I should point out that Andrew Aksyonoff (the developer) provided that patch to make Sphinx compatible with MySQL 5.1.20, but you’d probably have to check back on his site for version ugprades and such, esp. for newer versions of MySQL.

Now download the MySQL 5.1 sources — these are only going to be used to compile the Sphinx module:

cd /usr/src
wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/mysql-5.1.20-beta.tar.gz/from/http://mysql.he.net/
tar -xvzf mysql-5.1.20-beta.tar.gz
cd mysql-5.1.20-beta
cp -Rf /usr/src/sphinx-0.9.7/mysqlse/ storage/sphinx


Compile the Sphinx module against the MySQL 5.1 sources, but don’t install:

sh BUILD/autorun.sh
./configure
make

If you look in storage/sphinx/.libs you’ll see the loadable .so files that can plug in to MySQL easily. I suggest you copy them into a more permanent location:

mkdir /var/lib/mysql/plugins
cp storage/sphinx/.libs/ha_sphinx.* /var/lib/mysql/plugins

Now add this line to /etc/my.cnf and restart mysql:

plugin_dir=/var/lib/mysql/plugins

To install, log into the MySQL root and issue the ‘INSTALL PLUGIN’ command:

mysql -u root
mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN sphinx SONAME 'ha_sphinx.so';


To verify its installation, just run the ‘SHOW ENGINES’ command:

mysql> show engines;
| CSV | YES | CSV storage engine
.....
| SPHINX | YES | Sphinx storage engine 0.9.7

If you need further info, check out the doc-u-men-ta-tion.

If you have server that run on cPanel, you’ll probably know how big of a Nazi it is in regards to the MySQL versions it can run. We just got this new line of servers at work and one of them I was pretty heartset on installing MySQL 5.1, mainly because of its loadable plugin features where you can install a plugin or module without having to recompile the whole damn thing. Upgrading to 5.1 is easy, you just have to follow the right steps.

First, I would recommend upgrading to cPanel 11 or EDGE, which should have support for compiling Apache with non-supported versions of MySQL. On this server, I’m currently running 11 on the bleeding edge build. Also, it’s a splendid idea to dump all your databases before upgrading.
Note that these instructions mention MySQL 5.1.20-beta because that’s the latest release available at the time of my writing….but you can essentially follow this guide for any version of MySQL!

1. Copy the MySQL libraries from the server into a temporary location:

mkdir /root/sqllibs
cp /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.* /root/sqllibs

2. Find any installed MySQL packages:

rpm -qa | grep -i mysql-

This should present a list of installed rpm’s…remove them with rpm -e ,but note that some may need to be removed before others. Some people also would remove the /var/lib/mysql directory, but you can leave that there.

3. Download and install the MySQL 5.1.x packages:

Hop on over to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html#linux-x86-32bit-rpms and download the 5.1 RPM’s and install them:

rpm -i MySQL-client-5.1.20-0.glibc23.i386.rpm
rpm -i MySQL-devel-5.1.20-0.glibc23.i386.rpm
rpm -i MySQL-embedded-5.1.20-0.glibc23.i386.rpm
rpm -i MySQL-test-5.1.20-0.glibc23.i386.rpm
rpm -i MySQL-server-5.1.20-0.glibc23.i386.rpm

4. Prepare cPanel

You’ll want to make sure that cPanel’s updates don’t reset the MySQL version, so you need to run the following commands to force cPanel to skip MySQL updates:

touch /etc/mysqldisable
touch /etc/mysqlupdisable

Now edit /var/cpanel/cpanel.config and change the MySQL version to 5.1

Create the symlink:

ln -s /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp

Also, verify that the MySQL version is correct by running mysql -V

root@vps [~]# mysql -V
mysql Ver 14.13 Distrib 5.1.20-beta, for pc-linux-gnu (i686) using readline 5.0

5. Set up MySQL

MySQL should have already been started at this point, so you can attempt to log in as root using mysql -u root . If you are able to log in on the first try, great. If not, you’ll need to reset the MySQL password:

pico /etc/my.cnf

Add this line, and restart MySQL

skip-grant-tables

service mysql restart

Now log into MySQL root and set the password:


mysql -u root
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO root@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'yourpassword' WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> exit;

service mysql restart

When you’re done, remove the skip-grant-tables line from /etc/my.cnf and restart MySQL. Then log into Webhost Manager and reset the password *again*… this is necessary to build a bridge between the linux root user and the MySQL root user, so you can log into MySQL both through WHM’s phpMyAdmin, and SSH without a password when logged into the server as root.

All you need to do now is recompile Apache, but move the MySQL libraries back so easyapache can find them:

mv /root/sqllibs/libmysqlclient.* /usr/lib/mysql/

I haven’t tested too many configurations yet, but what works for me is Apache 2.2.4 with php 5.2.3, compiled with MySQL and mysqli, but NOT system MySQL.

So I talked to my stalker today, but it turns out that he only wanted to ask for directions to my house. I was a little disappointed, but I like to keep tabs on him anways. So far, here’s what I know:

- He has a bunny named Roxy (irony at it’s finest, as I used to have a Dutch bunny named Roxy, named after my surfboard)

- His favorite thing from Taco Bell is the grilled stuffed chicken burrito

- The bulge in his pocket is actually from the plastic bag that he wants to suffocate me with
So umm yea, that’s about all I know.

I therefore encourage all the young ladies out there to get to know your stalkers, so they can find you better. No one likes a party pooper.

If you use MySQL to keep a ton of records, it might be nice to be able to search for the particular entry you’re looking for via a simple form on your site. To set this up, we’ll make two scripts — one being the form itself, the other being script that executes the MySQL query.

In this example I created a simple form to query a database to look a person’s last name from a database column in an ‘addressbook’ database. First, we need to create the form. This is just a simple html file with a single input field:

<html>
<body>
<h4>Enter Last Name:</h4>
<form action="query.php" method="post">
Server: <input name="lastName" type="text" />
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>
</body>
</html>


Here i named the form field ‘lastName’, which will be the variable passed on to the php script and returned later on, and that the form action is set to ‘query.php’, which is the name of the script processing the form. Next, create a file called query.php:

In the first section we need to define a few database variables to allow the script to connect to the database:


<?php
// Make a MySQL Connection
$dbhost = "localhost";
$dbname = "database_name";
$dbuser = "database_user";
$dbpass = "password";


Next, we need to define the posted variable ‘lastName’, which we created in the form to allow that variable to pass into this script. If you have register_globals turned on (which is a BAD idea), you don’t need to do this.


$lastName = $_POST['lastName'];

Now for actual query itself. The syntax you use to search a database table is as follows:

SELECT <what info> FROM <table> WHERE <column>='<search term'>

So in that case, I want to select everything from the ‘names’ table where the last name is equal to what I search for, denoted by the variable ‘lastName’

$query = "SELECT * FROM names WHERE lastname='$lastName'";

Similarly if you wanted to search two tables in one query you can just use the UNION command like so:

$query = "SELECT * FROM name WHERE lastname='$lastName' UNION SELECT * FROM morenames WHERE lastName='$lastName'


Now that all that crap is defined, create the database link:


$dblink = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass);
mysql_select_db($dbname, $dblink);
?>

Now you can echo the results back into an array (in case there is more than one entry):

<h2> Query Results for <?php echo($lastName); ?> : </h2>
<?php
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result) or die(mysql_error());
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
echo $row['lastName']. " ", $row['firstName'];
echo "<br />";
}
?>

To explain above, the query is run against the database and the results are fetched as an array. The row(s) contained the search terms are then displayed to the screen based on the colums specified, which in this case are ‘firstName’ and ‘lastName’
In case you’re on the slower end, here’s the entire query.php script:

<?php
// Make a MySQL Connection
$dbhost = "localhost";
$dbname = "database_name";
$dbuser = "database_user";
$dbpass = "password";

$lastName = $_POST['lastName'];

$query = "SELECT * FROM names WHERE lastname='$lastName'";

$dblink = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass);
mysql_select_db($dbname, $dblink);
?>

<h2> Query Results for <?php echo($lastName); ?> : </h2>
<?php
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result) or die(mysql_error());
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
echo $row['lastName']. " ", $row['firstName'];
echo "<br />";
}
?>