I have about 5 servers that I maintain to run websites. In addition to the base system that DirectAdmin installs I have a requirement for a few additional modules.

These are memcache and LDAP.

I use Debian x64 and DirectAdmin, to try and keep things the same. So if it works on one, you test it on one… it should work on the others right?

Every time I upgrade PHP I have issues getting these two modules compiled back in (add custom modules).

I upgraded one server to PHP 5.6.8, using CustomBuild 2.0 I enabled LDAP. So my custom/ap2/configure.php56 looks like this, to add LDAP:

#!/bin/sh
./configure \
        --with-apxs2 \
        --with-config-file-scan-dir=/usr/local/lib/php.conf.d \
        --with-curl=/usr/local/lib \
        --with-gd \
        --enable-gd-native-ttf \
        --with-gettext \
        --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/lib \
        --with-freetype-dir=/usr/local/lib \
        --with-libxml-dir=/usr/local/lib \
        --with-kerberos \
        --with-openssl \
        --with-mcrypt \
        --with-mhash \
        --with-ldap \
        --with-mysql=mysqlnd \
        --with-mysql-sock=/tmp/mysql.sock \
        --with-mysqli=mysqlnd \
        --with-pcre-regex=/usr/local \
        --with-pdo-mysql=mysqlnd \
        --with-pear \
        --with-png-dir=/usr/local/lib \
        --with-xsl \
        --with-zlib \
        --with-zlib-dir=/usr/local/lib \
        --enable-zip \
        --with-iconv=/usr/local \
        --enable-bcmath \
        --enable-calendar \
        --enable-ftp \
        --enable-sockets \
        --enable-soap \
        --enable-mbstring \
        --with-icu-dir=/usr/local/icu \
        --enable-intl

Great, it works. LDAP is compiled in and everyone is happy.

I go and do the upgrade on the next server, no luck. The compiler for PHP says it can’t find the LDAP files. I check what ldap modules are installed on both machines with this:

dpkg-query -l '*ldap*'

Both machines show different results, the packages are mostly the same, but not exact. In fact the output of the dpkg-query is not the same, one shows an Architecture column and one does not. Hmmm… is one 64 bit and the other 32… checking on that… nope, both are 64 bit.

In the end on the machine with the issue where it says it can’t find the LDAP files I created a symlink to a ldap file I found.

ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libldap-2.4.so.2 /usr/lib/libldap.so

That was enough that it could compile and things seem to be working, but super frustrating that there are so many differences on machines where I try and keep things the same.

To have DirectAdmin monitor the status of the memecached instance you can add it to /usr/local/directadmin/data/admin/services.status and DirectAdmin will start/restart if necessary.

The DA guys document it here: http://www.directadmin.com/features.php?id=487

I get an email daily from cron on a few of my directadmin servers. No idea what it means or what that cron job is even supposed to be doing.

After searching around on the net there are a lot of people with the same issue.

Some of the suggested fixes do not sound very nice, like making some hacks to custombuild and then rebuilding every piece of software on the system. That simply sounds dangerous!

I found this blog post where the author deletes multiple copies that exist on his system and then create link to the correct version.

That sounded not so dangerous so I gave it a try and it worked. In my case I only had /usr/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.3 not /usr/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.3.4 so my solution looked more like this.

rm /usr/local/lib/libz.so.1
ln -s /usr/lib/libz.so.1.2.3 /usr/local/lib/libz.so.1

I don’t know why but DirectAdmin still rolls out with PHP 5.3 which was released in June 2009. It is now June 2014, how about an upgrade?

You might not want to jump to PHP 5.5 because it deprecates a bunch of the ‘old way’ of connecting to mySQL.

But is it safe to move to 5.4? If you want to find out and are running DirectAdmin, you can update with custom build like this:

cd /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild
./build update
./build set php5_ver 5.4
./build php n

Is your system still going to work? Guess you will have to upgrade and find out.

If you had installed any extensions that you compiled, odds are good they will no longer function because they were compiled for another version.

I ended up having to redo LDAP (which I compiled right in) and I had to redo APC and memcache as those were broken as a result of the PHP version upgrade.

To quickly fix memcache I just did the following to commands

pecl uninstall memcache

pecl install memcache

I recently put a request in to one of the datacenters where I have servers for an additional IP address. Of course they ask what is it for?

An SSL website was the reply…

I got back a note that we do not provide additional IP addresses for SSL anymore.

HU?

So there must now be a common way to put SSL on a shared IP, news to me.

Turns out it is called Server Name Indication which allows the hostname of the request to be included in the SSL handshake.

Turns out you can do it with DirectAdmin can do it, with a bit of tweaking. Looks like I will be putting SNI on my list of things to test.

I’ve got a few DirectAdmin servers running, anytime someone inserts data into the database I either escape the incoming data or use parametrized sql (better way).

If you find you insert something like Mr’Toad and you end up with Mr\’Toad on your screen you probably have one or more of PHP magic quotes enabled. Check your php.ini file and if you have one or more enabled turn them off.

A lot of systems will no longer run if they are enabled and as of PHP 5.3 they are DEPRECATED. If you happen to be using PHP 5.4 you will find they are totally REMOVED so don’t rely on them!

You will want to ensure you have lines in your php.ini showing they are off:

; Magic quotes are a preprocessing feature of PHP where PHP will attempt to
; escape any character sequences in GET, POST, COOKIE and ENV data which might
; otherwise corrupt data being placed in resources such as databases before
; making that data available to you. Because of character encoding issues and
; non-standard SQL implementations across many databases, it’s not currently
; possible for this feature to be 100% accurate. PHP’s default behavior is to
; enable the feature. We strongly recommend you use the escaping mechanisms
; designed specifically for the database your using instead of relying on this
; feature. Also note, this feature has been deprecated as of PHP 5.3.0 and is
; scheduled removed in PHP 5.4.
; Default Value: On
; Development Value: Off
; Production Value: Off
; http://php.net/magic-quotes-gpc
magic_quotes_gpc = Off

; Magic quotes for runtime-generated data, e.g. data from SQL, from exec(), etc.
; http://php.net/magic-quotes-runtime
magic_quotes_runtime = Off

; Use Sybase-style magic quotes (escape ‘ with ” instead of \’).
; http://php.net/magic-quotes-sybase
magic_quotes_sybase = Off

If you have any doubts about your system settings, check phpinfo();

If you have found yourself needing to access an LDAP server from PHP and your running on a DirectAdmin box you’re going to find it is not available by default.

Here is what I needed to do in order to get it running on a Debian system:

apt-get install php5-ldap libldap-dev

Copy the ldap.so file into the PHP extensions directory:

cp /usr/lib/php5/20090626/ldap.so /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/

Add the extension to your active php.ini file, in my case the active php.ini file was: /usr/local/lib/php.ini. You can find out the location of your working php.ini file through phpinfo().

extension=ldap.so

Restart Apache and you should be up and running (you can use phpinfo() to check if LDAP is available to you.

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

When you setup DirectAdmin, notification messages are by default sent to root@host.server.com.  For most people this would not be practical.

To easily modify where all messages to root are sent, the easiest is to create a .forward file for the root user.

Execute the following command and messages to root@host.server.com will automatically be forwarded to your actual email address and hey, you might actually get them that way.

echo "your@email.com" > /root/.forward

In addition to that, you need to ensure the permissions are correct on the .forward file. If you are running Exim, it is really picky about the security level on the files by default.

I found this works:

chmod 0600 .forward