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Posts Tagged ‘php’

Coming topics

June 18th, 2009 No comments

Just a small heads-up about what I’ve been up to…

My old server got hacked, so I had do finish the installation of critical services on my new server. To manage virtual domains I had installed WebMin with VirtualMin on it, but somehow it refused to work for e-mail. Not feeling much for reinstalling VirtualMin I searched for an alternative to manage the e-mail services. I’m now quite happy VirtualMin bugged because now I came across Zimbra. Zimbra is currently running on my new server and it’s just brilliant. The only shame is that it only supports Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and won’t support any other Ubuntu’s until Ubuntu 10 LTS. Installing Zimbra itself is quite easy so I will not be blogging about that, what I will be blogging about is what I did to make it more secure… I added mod_gnutls to my apache to benefit from it’s support for SNI which allows Virtual Hosting of HTTPS domains. With mod_gnutls with my own Root CA, server CA and P12 nobody but me can access the web interface of my Zimbra and with mod_ssl set up as a proxy, my apache provides an easy and secure bridge between Zimbra and the Internet. If this sounds interesting, keep your eye on my blog…

I’ve been planning on creating my own theme for this blog, but as usual work and other tasks mess up my priorities. Never the less, I did get a chance to pratice my theme making skills by creating a Wordpress MU theme at work for internal blogging. This brought me back on track with CSS and JavaScript again. What I started wondering is, is there any support for Continuous Integration with JavaScript. And is there automated Code Revision/Quality Assurance for JavaScript? Turns out there are possibilities… JavaScript Code Review is quite easy with JSLint, there are java ports and there’s Rhino, so getting it into a CI system like Hudson should be quite straight forward. There’s also JSUnit which allows Unit Testing of JavaScript. I’ll be experimenting with JSLint in Rhino and Hudson, but also in PHP! Recently the Mozilla JavaScript engine became available as an extension for PHP, so I’m curious about running JSLint and JSUnit in that.

These are just 2 very exciting topics I’m playing with at the moment, so stay tuned!

Categories: .this, Development Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

PHP based authentication for mod_dav

April 27th, 2009 1 comment

Introduction

To be able to create a Document Management System in Word using WebDAV on Apache webserver, I did some research on mod_dav, an Apache module to provide WebDAV support. It appears that the authaurisation part of mod_dav is limited to “allow all” / “deny all”, which did not quite suite my needs. The solution needed more fine-grained authorisation on a per-directory level. Another problem was that the authentication and authorisation data was in a database. Read more…

Categories: Software Engineering Tags: , , , , , , ,

Document Management System in Word using WebDAV

April 24th, 2009 No comments

Introduction

A customer I’m currently doing maintenance on their major application for, had an issue come up a couple of weeks ago where not all employees were to access all data any longer. The company deals with other companies and their employees, called members. The issue that came up caused a company wide policy to come in effect that meant that only specific users were to allow members or family of members to be accessed for a certain client company.

The application in question was easily modified since it already had support for authentication, so only authorisation for that specific company had to be added. (No we weren’t allowed to create a generic solution that would allow a reusable authorisation for multiple client companies. But discussing their policies is a whole different matter.) Read more…

Categories: Software Engineering Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,