Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

EasyApache 4
While we use Ubuntu and Debian things at work, I have a CentOS server that is (as of today) on CentOS 7. Which means not only is it weird and uses yum, but it has cPanel and WHM installed.

Over the last year or so, cPanel has been working on EasyApache 4 (EA 4). EasyApache is their … easy way to manage Apache and upgrade things. It’s an interface to help make things like your LAMP stack easier to comprehend, and it’s actually pretty nice. EA 3 has been around for a while, and it has serious limitations. Like you have to re-run EasyApache to upgrade PHP (always annoying), and you can’t have multiple versions of PHP. That means when you upgrade PHP to 5.6, everyone is upgraded to 5.6, and damned be the conflicts.

This … was a problem.

I have some older code that can use 5.6 but I’ve not been able to fully test it on 7. And I want 7. You don’t even know.

The actual upgrade process is remarkably painless. I had two errors, one of which was my own doing (don’t try to use opcache if you don’t have opcache installed…) and one was math related. The majority of my settings ported over painlessly.

AH00316: WARNING: MaxRequestWorkers of 40 is not an integer multiple of ThreadsPerChild of 25, decreasing to nearest multiple 25, for a maximum of 1 servers.

Obviously the fix there was to change MaxRequestWorkers to 50.

The interface itself is much nicer. It’s a modern design that is easy to look at with whitespace and tabbing that is natural. The only thing I didn’t like was I couldn’t tell it ‘Install PHP 7 and pick the same options as PHP 5.6 please.’ I ended up copying down what I’d selected for PHP 5.6 and then manually reproducing.

The provisioning process took a little getting used to, after years of EA 3, but once I had used it a couple times, it felt natural. This can be said of all things. Embrace change, right? It’s also faster, which is very welcome. The longest part is the review process, where it checks for conflicts. This used to happen ‘inline’ with the old deploy, so moving it out just changes the when. I found I preferred it, since I didn’t think “And I’m done!” I knew I couldn’t go forward.

Initially it installed suphp. I didn’t notice that’s what the default was and found all sorts of errors because of permissions. Errors like this:
```
SoftException in Application.cpp:255: File "/home/public_html/index.php" is writeable by group
SoftException in Application.cpp:613: Directory "/home/public_html/gallery" is writeable by group
```
I actually knew the fix for this was to run the following in my public_html folder:
```
find . -type f -name '*.php' -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
```
And yes, that solved everything. I was logged in as ~~Ms. Groves~~ root anyway, so I bounced through my users and ran it.

But… did I want to stay on suphp? Turns out EA 4 only supports FastCGI with the FastCGI Process Manager (PHP-FPM), and while I’ve been using that for a while (instead of the dread mod_php). The problem there is that suPHP or CGI PHP handlers don’t support opcache. That meant I either had to suck it up and do the manual install for FastCGI or I could wait for v58 of WHM, which will have a UI.

I opted to wait and stay on suPHP right now. The domains on my site are pretty fast, thanks to the SSD and a well optimized server. Load time did increase, I won’t lie, but it was pretty negligible. I don’t think it’ll really hurt things at this moment. I did some quick tests on GTmetrix and found my load time for sites on PHP 7 actually decreased.

And that’s why I wanted PHP 7. It’s just faster.
8 June, 2016
Is This A Good Name For Your Project?
If the answer to any of the following is not a ‘yes’ then no, you should not use the name for your project.

Again, every answer here should be yes.
1. Did you Google the name?
2. Did you check if the domain name was available?
3. Did you make sure no one else is using it for a similar project?
4. Did you check for trademarks and copyright conflicts?
5. Did you check it against a five year old and made sure they don’t giggle?
Congratulations! You Have a Good Name!

Maybe.

I do a lot of arguing with people over the idea of ‘how’ to name a project, because people want to make add-ons

For example, if you have written an add-on plugin for Microsoft Word, you can’t name your project “Microsoft Word Super Snazzy Map Add-On” but you can name it “Super Snazzy Map Add-On for Microsoft Word.”

Using a name like “My Product for Other Product” is something I consider common sense. Consider the example of Keurig. If you made an eco-friendly brew cup, you could market it “EcoBrew Pod for Keurig” but you could NOT attempt to market it as “Keurig EcoBrew Pod.” The latter implies a direct relationship to Keurig and may be against the law in some countries.

Being Original Is Hard

I don’t mean to dismiss this. It’s hard to come up with a name that is original, descriptive, and unique. It gets harder and harder every day. Consider that a number of today’s companies seem to have ripped their logo out of a 1989 design book

The Beats logo on the right compared to one found in the 1989 design book Tweeted by Spencer Chen.

Now we have long accepted in logos the limitation of language, letters, and combinations. It’s probably not theft, but it’s something you have to be aware of when a new project is named. Similarly, we accept the fact that naming something that is at once unique while still displaying your own flare is problematic.

I can’t offer you an answer that will fit everything, but I can offer you this. When you pick a name for your project, regardless of if you’re the big fish or the little one, it’s your responsibility to check if something even possibly related is already there. If you happen to name things at the same time, that’s an honest mistake, but if you know better going in, don’t be the bad guy.

What About The Bad Guy?

What happens, though, if a year or three down the line, you get an email telling you that your product is infringing on trademarks?

You have two choices:
1. Fight
2. Flight
There are weird issues in the US with Generic Trademarks. Like did you know heroin, thermos, and aspirin are genericized? That means we use the words ubiquitously to mean the general concept of ‘a thermos bottle’ or ‘that horrible drug’ without reference to the trademark holders.

That said, there are terms that are not generic, and yet we use them similarly. Band-Aid, Kleenex, Post-It, and Google. Yes. Google. Google actually has gone to the point of downranking you for terms like ‘googling it’ because they want to protect their brands.

So what happens when you get that email from Johnson & Johnson, telling you that your product “Mika’s Band-Aid for WordPress” is a trademark violation?

Fight or flight.

You can argue that no one would logically think that ‘band-aid’ in this case would ever be confused for their product. Or you can say “Oops, my bad. I was totally trying to leverage the term band-aid.” You can also ask them “Are there circumstances in which I can rebrand this so as to make it clear I’m not intending to violate your trademark while not losing the ground I’ve made with my product?”

I will suggest, if you chose to fight, to get a lawyer who specializes in trademark law.
6 June, 2016
SSD: An Anecdotal Journey

After I upgraded to Ogra, I noticed that my server’s load stats were a little janky. They were pretty high, actually, bouncing between .5 and 2 all the time. Now this isn’t really all that bad, but as I looked at my server, I realized I was paying a little more than I needed, since I’d cut down on space by offloading backups better.

This matters because I needed only 50G of diskspace (I only use about 30 right now for all the sites), and while I did want 2G of RAM, I could easily switch to an SSD on my hosting plan. It was cheaper, and it was as easy as pressing a button. I’ve never really gotten to play with SSD for this site, so I thought “what the hell” and pressed the button.

A weekend later…

The five minute load average shows a massive drop. It’s incredible. The red and blank spots are where I was running the actual migration process and disabled monitoring for a bit. Literally all I did was reboot the server and the move it to SSD. That’s it. It’s insane when you think about it.

By the way, I saved disk space by offloading the backups to Amazon S3. Amazon costs me about $3 a month, and while I detest their interface, the integration is built into WHM. I have an open feature requests to allow arbitrary CEPH destinations as backup so please vote for that if you like the idea.

SSDs had the bonus of changing my backup from taking 2 or 3 hours to taking 15 minutes.

Anecdotally SSD is an incredible improvement of the old bog hard drives.

3 June, 2016
Blocking Referrer Spam Server Wide Sucks
A while back I talked about Referrer Spam in Google Adsense and I mentioned how you could block referrer spam with some .htaccess calls. That’s cool, but when you have 12 sites on a server, making this one more thing to manage per site is a pain in the ass. Well okay, what can we do constructively? And sadly the answer is “Not much.”

First of all, forget the idea of using a robots.txt file. If they were real seo crawlers, they would honor this. They don’t and that’s how I know they’re evil.

Secondly, this will only work if you have server wide access. That should be obvious, but server wide settings need server wide access, and that’s just how it is. I say that it sucks because it can be a little complicated and messy to understand where you put things.

If you have your own server, like I do, then you can make a custom VirtualHost template

Since I’m using Apache 2.4, I made local templates:
```
$ cd /var/cpanel/templates/apache2_4/
$ cp ssl_vhost.default ssl_vhost.local
$ cp vhost.default vhost.local
```
If you’re using 2.2 then the files are in /var/cpanel/templates/apache2_2/ instead. In each file, I added this to the top of the VirtualHost settings.
```
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteOptions Inherit
```
What that does is it tells Apache that it should inherit Rewrite rules from the main server. That means each virtual host (i.e. each website) will abide by any rules in the local settings.

Where you put this in that file can be weird. I ended up looking for this section, and putting it right below:
```
[% IF !vhost.hascgi -%]
  Options -ExecCGI -Includes
  RemoveHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl .plx .ppl .perl
[% END -%]
```
Put that in both files. Because you use HTTPS, right? Then you need to bounce httpdconf:

/scripts/rebuildhttpdconf

Since I’m using WHM, the next step is to go in to the Apache Configuration section and open the Include Editor. Then you want to add your blocking directive in ‘Pre-Virtual Host Include’ for All versions. If you don’t use it, you’ll want to edit /usr/local/apache/conf/includes/pre_virtualhost_global.conf and bounce Apache after.

As you can see, I have some content in there already.

I added this below:
```
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} spammerseocompany\.com [NC,OR]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} keywords-monitoring-your-success\.com [NC]
  RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
</IfModule>
```
Does it work? Yes. It blocks ‘spammerseocompany’ from all my domains on my server. I put in the other URL since that’s the one they have that’s currently spamming the heck out of my stuff. There are a lot of other options with Apache 2.4, like sending them a 403 and so on. You should read up on using mod_rewrite to control access and pick the method you find most sustainable. For example, you could single like it:
```
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (spammerseocompany|keywords-monitoring-your-success)\.com [NC]
```
I find that a bit clunky.

If you’re using nginx, you’ll want this I believe:
```
if ($http_referer ~* "keywords-monitoring-your-success\.com|spammerseocompany\.com") {
    return 403;
}
```
A big note of caution here. If your list gets too long, you’ll end up slowing your server down. A lot. So keep it as simple as you can. I find that CSF does a dandy job of blocking the most of my trouble makers, and I only need this for the unnamed spammerseocompany because they don’t abide by the common rules of robots.

If, one day, they do, I will stop blocking them and allow their robots. As it stands, they’re idiots and need to go away.
1 June, 2016
How To Pick Your Webhost

This is not a real conversation, except it totally is.

User: I want hosting.
Me: What kind of site do you want to host?
User: A WordPress site!
Me: What kind of content do you plan on writing?
User: Oh you know, blog stuff.
Me: Okay… A food blog, a photo blog, a tech blog…?
User: Why are you asking me all this!?!?!

I’ve had so many conversations like this, I’m of the opinion that recommending hosting is a mugs game that simply cannot be ‘won’ so I generally don’t play.

Then why am I presuming I can tell you how to pick a webhost? Because I’m telling you how to pick a webhost, not who the best webhost is.

Preface

Someone will hate every single webhost on the planet. I use Liquidweb and DreamHost. People hate both of those. There’s the bevy of EIG companies whom people will detest and lambast and accuse of shady actions to be listed somewhere. There are the millions of small companies. There are good and bad companies, and there are reasons to use them. Whenever someone asks what host to use, I remind them that someone will hate their choice. That’s okay, just don’t take it personally and I recommend you ignore people who simply jump on bandwagons to tell you “X SUCKS!” They’re not being helpful.

Needs vs Wants

I repeat this a lot in myriad situations. Your needs are what your website needs, which should be obvious. If you’re running WordPress you need a webserver than runs a modern version of PHP and a MySQL (or MariaDB) database. That’s it. But that isn’t all of what you need for a website, and to understand your needs you need to be very clear about your own abilities, your capabilities, and the time you’re willing to commit to your project. Running a website is very time consuming and stressful. You can’t just set it and forget it.

Who Are You?

We should all know who we are, what our skills are, and what we enjoy doing. I’m like playing with servers and code. My wife prefers practical experimentation (she makes cheese and mead). My father is a mathematician. We’re all writers of a sort, but of the three of us I’m the one who runs the website and puts of articles on the regular. This is not because the others can’t, but because they know who they are. My father sends me his articles to post, my wife posts her own, and I both write my own for me but for my company, and I maintain the servers (and email). If you’re not me, and don’t have a me, you need a me. That may be your host, and it may not.

How Do You Communicate Best?

Do you get anxiety with phone calls? Look for a company with live chat and email support. Do you hate live chat? Are you dyslexic? Look for phone support. You know how you like to communicate with strangers, so pick a host that has what you need. I personally prefer ticket based systems, unless my server is actually on fire. That hasn’t happened much.

How Do You Add People?

Let’s say you decide to hire someone to work on your website. Do they need access to the server? Do they need access to your billing? How do you do that without giving them your passwords? Find out how the host handles this. Can you simply add a technical contact or will there be more complicated steps?

What Is Your Site About?

Why does this matter? Well, think of it this way. “I want to make a community site where people from my city can come and post news, events, crimes, etc.” Did you just think about BuddyPress? You will likely need a bigger server than Shared. “I want a photoblog!” Okay you will need to seriously look at diskspace, which means SSDs may be a little tricky for you since most limit space. Check if the host allows easy upgrades. “I’m going to run a multisite network for my school!” You need a private server. Knowing what your site is about will help you predict upcoming hurdles.

Do You Know Any Metrics?

Most people, especially people with a brand new site, are going to say “No!” here and that’s okay. But if you do know things like how much traffic you get or how often you post or how much disk space you use, talk to the host about it. Pre-sales questions like “What’s the best hosting plan for a site that gets 2000 visits a day, and then 12k on one day a week?” are the bread and butter of a host. If they can’t answer it, move on.

Does The Host Make You Feel Good?

If you get a bad feeling from the host at any step along the way, you feel like they’re dismissive or maybe not a good fit, walk away. Look, you need to be comfortable with your host, and if the advertising practices of a host upset you, don’t use them. It’s that simple. Even if they’re the best for your needs, if they make you uncomfortable, you will be miserable. And remember, for every single host there will be people who hate them. That’s okay too. If it works for you, and you feel good about doing business with them, then that is really all that matters.

30 May, 2016
A Simplier Hugo Deploy
I have a Hugo site that I’ve been deploying by running Hugo on the server. But this isn’t the only way about it.

If you use Git and it’s on the same server as your site, and owned by the same user, it’s remarkably easy to do this.

First make sure the public folder in your Hugo repository is being tracked. Yes, this can make your repository a little large but that’s not something to worry about too much. Space is cheap, or it should be. Next make a folder in tmp – I called mine library – to store the Git output in.

The new post-update code then looks like this:
```
#!/bin/sh

SRC_DIR=$HOME/tmp/library/public/
DST_DIR=$HOME/public_html/library/

export GIT_WORK_TREE=$HOME/tmp/library/
git checkout -f

rsync -a --delete $SRC_DIR $DST_DIR 

exit
```
What this does is checkout the Git repository and then copy it over. The format of the sync will delete anything not found. Done.

The benefit of this method is that you don’t need to install GoLang or Hugo on your server, and everything is pure and simple Git and copy. Rsync is a delightful way to copy everything over as well. You can delete the temp folder when you’re done, but the checkout process handles things for you. Another nice trick is you can specify what branch to checkout, so if you have a special one for publishing, just use that.

But could this be even easier? Yes and no. You see, what I’m going is checking out the whole thing and then copying over folders. What if I could tell Git to just checkout the code in that one folder?

There’s a think called a ‘sparse checkout’ where in I can tell Git “Only checkout this folder.” Then all I have to do is go into that folder and checkout the content I wanted. The problem there is it literally checked out the folder ‘public’ and what I wanted was the content of the public folder. Which means while it’s ‘easier’ in that I’ve only checked out the code I need, I can’t just checkout it out into where I want. I will always have to have a little extra move.

To set up my folder, I did this:
```
cd ~/tmp/library/
git init
git remote add -f origin ~/repositories/library.git
git config core.sparsecheckout true
echo public/ >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
git checkout master
```
And then my script remains the same. But! This is going to be a faster checkout since it’s only ever going to be exporting and seeing the folders it needs.
27 May, 2016