Do you wonder How to change <meta name="Generator" content="Joomla! – Copyright (C) 2005 – 2007 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved." /> in Joomla 1.5
If yes, Here is how I've just found to remove the:
in my Joomla installation.
I need to remove that as a part of making my website not to leak out that it runs on top of Joomla.
So here is how:
1. Go to your Joomla website main root directory 2. Edit /libraries/joomla/document/html/renderer/head.php Look for line: 83 in the /libraries/joomla/document/html/renderer/head.php There you will notice the code:
In order to remove the <meta name="generator" content="Joomla …." /> change the above code to something like:
$strHtml .= $tab.'<meta name="generator" content="My Custom Web site Generator name" />'.$lnEnd;
That's all now next time you refresh your website the content="Joomla! – Copyright (C) 2005 – 2009 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved." will be no more. Cheers! 🙂
Our servers are quite busy serving about 50 000 to 100 000 requests and thus not having enabled caching puts a lot of extra load on the CPU and eats a lot of memory which were usually saved by eAccelerator. Logically I tried fixing the issues following someStackoverflow threads recommendations such as this one but didn't work I tried playing manually spending hours trying to make eaccelerator run again and as a final mean, I even tried to upgrade eaccelerator to newer version but noticed the latest available eaccelerator version 0.9.6 was 2.5 years old (from 03.09.2012). Thus while there is no new release, just make s so just to make sure I didn't break the module with (default Debian bundled distribution package which is also installed on the servers) re-installed eAccelerator from source .
This didn't worked either and since I was totally pissed off by the worsened systems performance (CPU load increased with to 10-30%) per server, I looked for some alternatives I can use and in the mean time I learned a bit more about history of PHP Accelerators, I learned some interesting things such as that ionCube (PHPA) was the first PHP Accelerator Apache like module (encoding PHP code), created in 2001, later it become inspirational for birth to PHP-APC(Alternative PHP Cache) Apache module. There is also Zend Opcache PHP accelerator (available since PHP 5.5 onwards) but since Zend OpCache caches well PHP Zend written PHP code and servers run PHP 5.4 + sites are not using Zend PHP Framewosk this was an option. Further investigation lead me to MMCache which is already too obsolete (latest release is from 2013), PHPExpress – PHP Encoder which was said to run on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris) but already looks dead as there were no new releases since January 2012) and finally Lighttpd's XCache.
To give you an idea on what exactly is the difference between Apache Webserver with PHP-APC Caching or other PHP Cacher enabled and the Standard way PHP Interprets PHP scripts below is a diagram:
Obviously my short research shows that from all the available PHP Cache Encoder / Accelerators only ones that seemed to be recently updated (under active development) are APC and XCache. I've already used PHP-APC earlier on some servers and was having having some random Apache Webservers crashes and weird empty pages with some PHP pages and besides that APC is known to give lower speed in PHP caching thanEaccelerator and XCache, leaving me with the only and logical choise to use XCACHE.
Here is how Xcache developers describe their opcacher:
XCache is a free, open source operation code cacher, it is designed to enhance the performance of PHP scripts execution on servers. It optimizes the performance by eliminating the compilation time of PHP code by caching the compiled version of code into the memory and this way the compiled version loads the PHP script directly from the memory. This will surety accelerate the page generation time by up to 5 times faster and also optimizes and increases many other aspects of php scripts and reduce website/server load.
Thanksfully XCache is shipped by default with all Debians (Etch /Lenny / Squeeze / Wheezy) Linuces so to install it just run the standard apt cmd:
apt-get install –yes php5-xcache
Then to enable XCache all I had to do is edit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and place below code:
[xcache.admin] xcache.admin.enable_auth = On ; Configure this to use admin pages ; xcache.admin.user = "mOo" ; xcache.admin.pass = md5($your_password) ; xcache.admin.pass = ""
[xcache] ; ini only settings, all the values here is default unless explained
; select low level shm/allocator scheme implemenation xcache.shm_scheme = "mmap" ; to disable: xcache.size=0 ; to enable : xcache.size=64M etc (any size > 0) and your system mmap allows xcache.size = 16M ; set to cpu count (cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep -c processor) xcache.count = 1 ; just a hash hints, you can always store count(items) > slots xcache.slots = 8K ; ttl of the cache item, 0=forever xcache.ttl = 0 ; interval of gc scanning expired items, 0=no scan, other values is in seconds xcache.gc_interval = 0; same as aboves but for variable cache
Note that Debian location which instructs xcache to load in Apache as a module is xcache.ini – e.g. /usr/share/php5/xcache/xcache.ini, so instead of placing above configuration right into php.ini you might prefer to place it in xcache.ini (though I personally prefer php.ini) because it is easier for me to later control how PHP behaves from single location.
To test whether XCache is enabled for Apache Webserver:
Create phpinfo.php somewhere in DocumentRoot (in my case this was /var/www/php_info.php)
debian-server:~# vim /var/www/php_info.php
<php? phpinfo() ?>
When you access the php_info.php in browser you will get XCache loaded as in below screenshot:
To Test whether Xcache is enabled also for PHP CLI (applications set to run as a crontab – cronjob) :
debian-server:~# php -v PHP 5.4.37-1~dotdeb.0 (cli) (built: Feb 2 2015 05:03:00) Copyright (c) 1997-2014 The PHP Group Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2014 Zend Technologies with XCache v3.2.0, Copyright (c) 2005-2014, by mOo with XCache Cacher v3.2.0, Copyright (c) 2005-2014, by mOo
Once it is tested as successful install you might want to enable the XCache admin (which is disabled by default), to enable XCache Admin on Debian you need to generate new password for it first like so:
Then you need to add in /etc/php5/mods-available/xcache.ini
debian-server:~# vim /etc/php5/mods-available/xcache.ini [xcache.admin] xcache.admin.enable_auth = On ; Configure this to use admin pages xcache.admin.user = "admin" ; xcache.admin.pass = md5($your_password) xcache.admin.pass = "change_with_above_generated_password_here"
To enable admin and be able to access it in a browser (if you're using as a documentroot /var/www/ and docroot supports interpretting php scripts and (has AllowOverride All) enabled to also support htaccess authentication do:
debian-server:~# cd /var/www/ debian-server:~# ln -sf /usr/share/xcache/htdocs/ xcache
When you access http://your-url-address.com/xcache/ you should see in browser some statistics along with all configured xcache options:
If you have time you can play with the options and get some speed minor speed improvements. The overall increase in page opening XCache should give you is between 100% – 190% !
I had to change my mysql root password for one of the servers since during the install I mispasted the password in the MySQL password prompt I needed the pwd to be changed.
Changing the MySQL password is also possible with mysql cli, after connecting to the sql server, though this method is a bit more time consuming. Here is how to do it from mysql console:
linux:~# mysql -u root -p
Server version: 5.1.49-3 (Debian)
Copyright (c) 2000, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are welcome to modify and redistribute it under the GPL v2 license
Type ‘help;’ or ‘h’ for help. Type ‘c’ to clear the current input statement. mysql> use mysql; mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD(“NEW_PASSWORD”) where User=’root’;mysql> flush privileges;
Of course it’s possible to do change the root pass via phpmyadmin Cheers 😉
I never liked Mandrake Linux, since day 1 I saw it. Historically Mandrake Linux was one of the best Linux distributions available for free download in the "Linux scene" some 10 to 12 years ago.
Mandrake was simple gui oriented and trendy. It also one the Linux distribution with the most simplified installer program and generally a lot of GUI software for easy configuration and use by the end user.
Though it's outside nice look, still for me it was like an "intuition" that Mandrake is not so good as it appeared.
Now many years later I found by chance that Mandrake has been sued to change their Operating System name with another, due to a law suit requit by the copyright holders of Mandrake The Magician comics. "Mandrake the Magician" used to be a very popular before the Second World war in the 1930's.
It obviously not a co-incidence that the Mandrake names was after this comics and not the mandrake herb plants available in Europe, Africa and Asia. This is clear in Mandrake Linux distro earlier mascot, you see below:
Later on they changed Mandrake's logo to loose the connection with Mandrake The Magician and used another new crafted logo:
Its quite stunning nowdays magician obsession, has so heavily infiltrated our lives that even something like a Free Softwre Linux distribution might have some kind of reference to magician and occult stuff (I saw this from the position of being Christian) …
Later due to the name copyright infringement Mandrake Linux was renamed first to Mandragora Linux. Instead of putting some nice name non related to occultism or magic stuff the French commercian company behind Mandrake rename it to another non-Christian name Mandragora. Interestingly the newer name Mandragora as one can read in wikipedia means:
Mandragora (demon), in occultism
Well apparently, someone from the head developers of this Linux distribution has a severe obsession with magic and occultism.
Later MandrakeSoft (The French Company behind Mandrake Linux) renamed finally the distribution to Mandriva under the influence of the merger of Mandrake with the Brazillian company Connectiva this put also an over to the legal dispute copyright infringement dispute with Hearst Corporation (owning the rights of Mandrake the Magician).
Having in mind all fact on current Mandriva "dark names history", I think it is better we Christians avoid it …
Many younger people, might not know lpr command, historically it was heavily used for printing in the early GNU / Linux days. lpr ships the text to be printed to the printer which is physically attached on LPT (Line Print Terminal) parallel port . Those who lived the DOS era surely know in those "ancient" days, everyone who wanted to print has to use the LPT parallel port
Present time, everyone knows there is almost no modern printer that is attached to the PC via LPT port but rather the USB port is used for communication between the printer the computer. Nevertheless The USB printers on Linux are managed by CUPS, the lpr command is still functional shipping the text to be printed via CUPS (cups-lpd daemon). Before cups-lpd was introduced the service managing the print jobs was lpd Hence lpr is still functional.
To print a plain text file of one page with lpr on Linux:
linux:~# cat text-file-to-print.txt | lpr
For multiple printers to switch between multiple printers there is the PRINTER shell variable:
linux:~# export PRINTER=printer-Name-and-Type
To print a really long text file (a book in TXT) the pr command comes handy. As you can read in the cmd manual pr – converts text files for printing
Lets say you would like to have a 60 lines of text per printed page, the cmd to issue is:
linux:~# pr -l60 text-file-to-print.txt | lrp
All queued printing jobs can be reviewed with the lpq, if you have a printer attached try:
linux:~# lpq
lp is ready and printing
Rank Owner Job Files Total Size
active hipo 1 text-file-to-print.txt 62045 bytes
Since some years it is pretty rare for people to use lpq, since most of the parallel printing is managed by CUPS server, what most people use nowdays to check the printer queue is lpstat : e.g.
linux:~# lpstat
...
Printing status and all things related to queued jobs for printing gets logged in /var/log/lpr.log
There is even more simplistic way to print directly to the printer (if the printer is attached via a LPT port) through the kernel /dev/lp, for example:
linux:~# cat text-file-to-print.txt >> /dev/lp
For more than one printer attached the naming of /dev/lp, might probably be /dev/lp0, /dev/lp1 etc. The lprm command also exists in case if you would like to cancel a printjob in the queue. Lets say I want to cancel a job in the queue with Job ID 5:
linux:~# lrpm 5
...
To cancel a current running job in the middle the /usr/bin/cancel command exists.
An interesting historic fact is that nowdays opening lpr, lpq or any of the other tools for simple text mode printing one sees on top of the page Apple Inc.
Lets clear this up CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) (open source) printing platform is not owned by Apple, since it is licensed under GPL2 and LGPL. The reason why the Apple Inc. shows up in man pages is because in year 2007, the founder of CUPS printing server Michael Sweet hired him to work for Apple Inc. "purchasing" the CUPS source. However as we know they did not really purchased the code, because the code was already belonging to the community (licensed under GPL2). Apple however as a marketing trick used the fact that Sweet worked for them and as probably as a matter of marketing asked him to place the Apple Inc. in the copyright source and manual areas. Obviously this is not true, since Apple Inc. does not hold copyright for CUPS as CUPS can be copied by anyone (its open source) 😉
Most of the people will never print using this commands, since printing is now, ages ahead, anyways for simple people (like me), who just need to print a text with no special fonts or graphics text printing is just great.
Text printing is also a good learning experience for Linux novices and is good to be known just as a piece of UNIX history.
r freedomYesterday silently with zero publicity, Bulgarian representatives ratified the ACTA (Trade agreement for fighting counterfeit.) The name sounds really good, but it has not much to do with what ACTA is about, when applied to digital medias and data sharing. The ACTA legislation has been ratified in Tokyo last week, where 22 of the European Union membership countries signed in favour of these "malicious" treaty.
The basic idea of ACTA looks tempting as it gives more freedoms to copyright holders, however if you look closely you will understand actually this copyright infringement clauses are not so in favour of us the users but mostly in favour of multinational corporations. For all those who have not heard about ACTA and SOPA in short this is anti freedom of speech treaty, which if put in action could lead to serious filtering of the internet. The ACTA 's controversial treaty has already raised an outcry from dozens of computer literated individuals who daily use the internet. Unfortunately, ACTA is less known among non-tech guys … and hence most people on the internet have no about its existence.
If ACTA is ratified and set to be valid as a legislation to Bulgaria, this could lead to total Internet censorship in BG (more or less like it is in china now). ACTA legislation will make sharing files via torrents and other P2P community file sharing networks a criminal activity. Another effect of ACTA is that practically free software which reads a proprietary formats like DVD becomes illegal in Europe (like it is currently in America) and I will become guilty for just reading the non-free format.. As a result of ACTA our ISP (Internet Service Providers) will be forced to log and keep all traffic flowing through their (Routering servers). Filters on a local ISP level that will be censoring free speech could also become totally lawful… Already there are plenty of ANTI-ACTA and ANTI-SOPA propaganda website which are trying to bring some more awareness to the public for the issue… Once an individual is suspected, to fraudulent activity or anything that breaks what is in ACTA is he is presumed to be guilty of crome … Just watch the two videos below and you will see how terrible the consequence could be if this legislation is integrated with todays Bulgarian government laws. If you're hearing for ACTA for a first time and you live in a country which has still not rafitied ACTA as a local country legislation, make sure you spread the word and let all your friends about the bad impact of this anti-human legislation. We have to really stand up and protest to retain our digital freedom !
The Internet can be censored if Protect IP ACT (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are put in action !
I needed to use another computer (IPad 2)to add one guy as a future business contact. I was suprised by a message which you see in the screenshot. Facebook your account is temporary locked
obviously Facebook are becoming more and more impudent, so now apart from tracking all my activity in facebook and having the copyright rights over all my pictures uploaded, they now want to bind me to use their shitty service only from a single computer.
“We don’t recognize the device you’re using.” is scary to me personally and it shows a very bad direction, we have taken. Now its supposed that any normal member of society is using his personal personal computer equipment (notebook, desktop, mobile tablet etc.), where the direction is that unification of devices is happening with development of handheld devices, so suddenly, we might soon be forced to only use only one personal device for all kind of activities phone calls, entertainment, checking online … etc. you name it Then imagine, we might little by little be forced by mass adoption to only use this devices for all kind of communication. Let me explain a bit thoroughflly what I mean. With the invention of the radio, people part of modern society has little by little started adopting the TVs as a device to retrieve information from various types from a centralized sources.
A time came, where everybody in the developed countries were using the radio, then came the TV and the television as a mass media, people who previously used the radio has comparatively quickly migrated to TVs and little by little, the radios use from the masses died. Then came the more advanced kind of technologies the computers, first they were used by only choosen “elite” people who were beneficial to live in the developed society where first mainframe computers were invented, the technology was advanced and when the personal computers went out, the decrease of computer price allowed practically almost everyone from the developing or the development world to buy and start using it. The increased use of computers and the emerge of Internet in the end of ’80s has suddenly shifted the mass use of TV to computer use. People were crazy about computers, now most of the young and mid aged people from developed societies has almost completely abandoned the TV as a mean to get informed as the computer is doing the same. The emerge of pagers and mobile phones little by little and the development of the mobile phones has lead many people who actively was using a PC to switch to use of mobile or handheld devices and therefore forget compeltely about old desktop computers. These days even laptops use is getting threatened by tables like IPAD or Samsung’s Android tabloid. The trend therefore is that people who actively use their computers switch to tabloids and mobile phones in the next 10 years at worst. It’s more and more rarely now that people use a random computer device to access the internet or in there daily lives this creates a very severe possible short-coming future issue as its possible we reach the time that most services available online might only be accessible via only certain devices which has “a hardware” (hard or unchangeble way to identify us). This might sound a bit like a scenario for a sci-fi movie but unfortunately I see it as one very possible scenario. If the idea of online provided resources and services social networks like twitter,facebook, xing etc. is originally to provide easy access to piece of information from anywhere in the world they shouldn’t definitely try to restrict us on how we use their services (especially if this is not illegal or in contradtion in country’s law.
I really feel my privacy violated by facebook and I’ll probably delete my account there or always access it via a proxy further, I don’t like the idea that facebook is able to detect based on my IP change from country to country, the cookie shit it stores int he browser and browser and OS version of my computer what exactly is my computer and that I’m the only one to use this computer. What would it be if I was in a poorer country where the computer is used by many people, or I have borrowed my sister to travel abroad and use my notebook to access the internet and surrounding daily services she uses. She might for example used the desktop at home and when travelling outside with my notebook access facebook, its a perfectly possible scenario. I don’t like the idea that I’m currently associated with a single computer really this is too much.The idea of linking my credentials for a shitty website like facebook to my personality is something I really don’t think is right. If the Cloud Computing and online services should continue, there at least should be a government law to enforce, monopolists in online services to encrypt the user data in order to prevent, some facebook sysadmin or programmer or even the facebook Management board or CEO to have immediate access to privat information one puts in.
Same goes also for google, yahoo msn etc. Having an email account at any of the services and searching online reveals a lot of sensitive personal data, i’m quite sure that google/msn’s information stored for all the mail user accounts using the search engine services contains very sensitive information about a person’s personal private life and likings. I’m quite sure google and the most of the big elephant companies are spying on their users and do create a thorough personal records for their users. Scroogle instead of Google, improving browser security to secure, browser leaked personal identity data, Anonymizing ICQ and MSN to route traffic via tor , anonymizing Skype to hide your IP with Tor , Install torbutton to route Firefox browser traffic via Tor or use a combination of all to try to increase the level of anonimity online. Also with the mass production and deloment of GPS integrated with most modern mobile phones, notebooks, cars etc. its pretty easy for one to be found nomatter where he is. Its getting almost impossible for us to keep privacy and anoimty. While looking in the future and the latest technology development it appears situation will be getting worser. Maybe the only way in future times for a man to be free will be completely abandon technology, as every piece of technology nowdays is doing some kind of tracking and leaking information about its user. The increase of public security on airports, bus stations e.g. in airplanes, buses stregthens general society security, however it does this on account of decrease of personal privacy and makes us humans more and more dependent on “the system”.
All this induces a serious threat especially with the increase of unification of local countries and country adhering societies as a direct cause of globalization. The globalization also leads to unification and merging of laws in countries around the world. The result from all this is also absollute necesity of internationalion of banking and financing system which is currently happening in front of our eyes. They say it’s security measure but is it reall, just imagine if Gail, Yahoo or any otherBut let’s be optimistic, maybe I’m over-exaggerating, maybe things will go for good in short future and the “Doom scenario” will not happen 😉
