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How to easy add Joomla 1.5 donate Paypal capabilities with Joomla PAYPAL DONATION MODULE

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

Many joomla CMS installations are for Non-profit organizations or Non Government organizations. These are organizations which are not officially making profit and therefore this instituations are interested into donations to support their activities.

In this occasions adding Joomla paypal capabilities is very essential. There are plenty of modules which enables Joomla to support paypal monetary payments, however many of them are either paid or requires registration and thus it’s quite time consuming to set up a decent PayPal supporting module for Joomla.
After a bit of investigation thanks God, I’ve come across a module that is free of charge, easily downloadable (wihtout registration) and is also relatively easy to configure, these module is called PAYPAL DONATION MODULE
I’ve mirored the module to my server, just in case if the module disappears in the future.

Here are a very brief explanation on how the module can be downloaded installed and configured:

First Download (mod_ojdonation_pp) Paypal Donation Module here

Install it as joomla module via:

Extensions -> Install/Uninstall
menu

Afterwards, go to:

Extensions -> Module Manager

In the list of modules you will notice the Donate module which will be disabled. Use the Enable button to enable it.

Next by clicking on the Donate Module Name, one can configure the module, where the most essential configuration values that needs to be filled in are:

1. Title: – The title of the donation form:
2. Donation Title: – Title of donation picture to show in the webpage
3. Donation Amount: – Default donation amount user will donate with paypal by clicking on Donate button
4. Currency – Default currency the donators will use to donate to configured paypal account
5. Paypal ID: – The email address of paypal account your donators will donate to (This was a bit hard to understand since Paypal ID is not a number ID but the email address configured as an username in PayPal).
6. Donation Description: – Description text to appear before the Donate button
7. Donation Footer: – Text to appear after the Donate button

There are two ways one could add the donation module to show the donation form, on the joomla website:
a. One is to enable the donation button on every joomla webpage (I don’t like this kind of behaviour).

To use this kind of donate button display approach, you will have to select from the Donation module, conf options:
– Show on FrontPage: and Show Title:

Also make sure the Enabled: option is set to Yes

b. Second approach is to set the PayPal Donation form only to appear on a single menu, to do so:

While in Paypal Donation Module configuration in Menu Assignment section, select:

Select Menu Item(s) from the List
instead of the default All value set for Menus.

The last setting to be choosen is the paypal donation form page location (where exactly on the selected pages the form will appear).

The form location is set from the Position: dropdown menu, the option which I found to be the best one for me was the bottom option. However just play with the Position setting and choose the one that will be best for you.

Then scroll on in the Menu Selection: and choose only the menus where you want a paypal donation form to appear.

Finally to save all the recent made settings, click on Apply and refreshing in a new page should show you paypal’s money donation form in joomla

If all is configured fine with Joomla’s – Paypal Donation Module you should get on your webpage:

Tags: amount, Button, buttonThere, capabilities, cms, configuration values, configure, configured, consuming, currency, default, DONATION, Donation Amount, Donation Description, Donation Footer, Donation Title, donations, donators, explanation, footer, form, future, government organizations, How to, Install, investigation, Joomla, location, menu, mod, monetary payments, number id, occasions, ojdonation, option, page, paypal id, profit organizations, show, Show Title, time, username, webpage
Posted in Joomla, Various, Web and CMS | No Comments »

How to restore lost (forgotten) MySQL Server root password

Monday, July 4th, 2011

MysQL recover forgotten lost root mysql server password

On a couple of occasions, I’ve had the issue of loosing / forgetting a MySQL password at other times I had to login to servers which contained MySQL servers with a password I don’t know.

In any of this occasions I was required to restore the ROOT access to the mysql server.

Sadly recoving a mysql lost root password is not really possible in a easy way, thus in most cases the only option one have is to stop the mysql server and run it again in a special skip-grant-tables mode, which runs the server in a sort of passwordless safe mode and makes it accessible without admin password through mysql cli .

To Omit the password check the skip-grant-table option instructs the MySQL server not to check in mysql.user while any request to connect with mysql client to the server is made.

Therefore one can login to the mysql server passwordless and reset the current (lost) password to another one.
Thease can be achived in the following four easy steps:

1. Stop the MySQL server

mysql:~# /etc/init.d/mysqld stop

2. Run the mysql server with the –skip-grant-tables option

mysql:~# mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &

3. Login to the mysql and change current mysql root password

mysql:~# mysq -u root mysql> UPDATE user SET password=PASSWORD('yournewpassword') WHERE user='root'; mysql> FLUSH privileges;

4. Stop and Start the Mysql server again

mysql:~# killall -9 mysqld_safe mysql:~# /etc/init.d/mysqld start ..

Now the new mysql password will be identical to the yournewpassword . Cheers 😉

Tags: amp, Cheers, cli, client, couple, FLUSH, issue, killall, login, Mode, mysq, mysql password, mysql servers, mysqld, occasions, password, password check, Privileges, request, root, root password, safe mode, safemysql, server root, servermysql, Set, sort, Stop, thease, update, way, WHERE
Posted in Linux, MySQL, System Administration | No Comments »

Why and How facebook profits because of you? – People, The real facebook investors

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Facebook is usually praised and very seldom criticized. I've seen already on a couple of occasions on the TV channel news on earthquake occasions or some kind of other calamities, where facebook was said to help the rescuing teams etc. We constantly hear how facebook has helped people point their location in disastrous situations or just helping people organize a protest against a harmful company activity. Whilst this might be true, the harms it does are quite big as well. A primary harm it does is to economy as we know it. As people are engaged in filling in Mark Zuckerberg and facebook investors pockets, they rarely think about how actually facebook gets their money?

Let me explain:

Basicly facebook makes money out of its constantly increased social network data content. This could have not been possible without the 800 000 000+ million of people who constantly post updates on facebook, create groups, post pictures, add likes, comment and post links to other facebook pages. If people had not all this volunteers (facebook users) to post all this bunch of mostly junky information, facebook inc. would not have a penny. Therefore what makes facebook grow is the people itself who willingly choose to be part of this money making machine. One would think with regular company the investors are the owners of the company shares. This classical business model is not facebook model, there it is rather different as the real investors in facebook are not the capital shareholders but the regular social network user base – this means (you and me)!.

For all those who still don't get what I'm talking about I will shortly explain.
Everyone who has a basic idea on how internet advertising works is aware that the primary origin for facebook todays profit is the left pane sky scraper field with ever changing advertisements.

Various advertisers pays facebook all the time big money for displaying those stupid advertisement. As many peole are viewing and clicking the advertisements, facebook makes billions out if its advertisers.

So far so good, facebook generates its profits out of peoples free time and delibarately information sharing you would say and you might argue me that facebook steals people (time / money). This would have been true if you don't put in the picture for a contrast, a regular blogger, who makes its daily living out of blogging.
What a regular blogger does is frequent blogging on various kind of topics of his interest. Various bloggers blog at various titles, but most of them has a few major topics which they're following.

The more articles a blogger collects and the higher the uniqueness of this information is the bigger the probability this blog to have a good users base and the more interesting content it will have for search engine robots like Google Bot Crawlers or Yahoo Bot etc. etc.
With all priod said, the higher the probability this blog to have more traffic drawn from web searches to the blog. As the blogger content increases with time when it gets 10000 or more unique articles (pages), consequently it can be used as an advertising place. A 10000 pages blog could earn a person a few hundred of euros (200, 300 EUR) per month.

Well the business scheme behind facebook is exactly the same, except they store and physically own the data of the facebook registered persons. The user posts content on his facebook wall, makes pages or does various activities which generate pages, the content gets indexed in Google and with time the overall facebook website content grows. As new users joins facebook with the increased popularity of website. The website is growing exponentially like in a atoms chain reaction.

Because of this steady content growth, it becomes an interesting place not only for advertisers but for all kind of people that use the internet.
And there you have the monetarization facebook makes billions of dollars every second because of you. This is the shocking truth, they get their money because people click or view advertisement on each others profile, so there you're YOU make the little people who develop facebook and the original investors richer and richer with every day, where you make yourself poorer and poorer by investing your personal time in facebook instead of using it to work on something that will potentially generate you some dividents in short or long future.

Actually social network is nothing more than just a multiple blogging platform, but some marketing person come with this marketing hype work "social network".
The social network buzz word is in my view just another big marketing "white lie"!. Correct me if i'm wrong but what in fact is a "Social network?". I don't see facebook neither as social, network as network. I don't know about you but I have never made a long lasting friend or relationship using facebook so far. I think the poor Facebook creator Zuckerberg made facebook with a viral mindset. He intended it to be like a social virus and so far he succeed pretty much. I just wait and eager to see who will start the anti-virus for Zuckerberg's (facebook) – people time eating virus.

Tags: advertisements, advertisers, advertising works, Auto, billions, blogger, business model, calamities, capital, channel news, company shares, content, contrast, data content, disastrous situations, Draft, earthquake, economy, Engine, everyone, facebook, information, interest, internet advertising, junky, left pane, location, machine, mark zuckerberg, network content, occasions, peole, person, picture, place, pockets, profits, Search, shareholders, sky, sky scraper, time, tv channel, volunteers
Posted in Business Management, Entertainment, Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »

How to fix a broken QMAIL queue with queue-repair and qmhandle

Friday, May 27th, 2011

How qmail works, qmail queue picture :)

The aim of this small post is to give just a brief idea of how I fix my qmail server after breaking it or in case it is broken after mail bomb attacks, etc.

Most common cases when I break my qmail queue myself, are after I’m implementing some new patches and reinstall parts of the qmail server with a patched version of default qmail binaries.
On other occasions, I simply used the qmailctl to start or stop the server as a part of some routine tasks necessery for the administration of the qmail server.

Everybody who has already experience with qmail should have experienced, that qmail is very fragile and could break even with a simple changes, though if it works once it’s rock solid piece of mail servant.

Below I explain few ways I used through my days as a qmail sys admin to deal with broken or messed queues.

1. Fixing a broken qmail queue using automatic tools There are few handy tools which in most cases are able to solve issues with the queue, one very popular one isqueue-repair – check http://pyropus.ca/software/queue-repair/.
Installation of qmail-repair is dead easy, but it needs to be installed from source as no official debian package is available:

linux:/usr/local/src# wget http://pyropus.ca/software/queue-repair/queue-repair-0.9.0.tar.gz linux:/usr/local/src# tar -xzvvf queue-repair-0.9.0.tar.gzdrwxr-xr-x charlesc/qcc 0 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/ -rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 268 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/TODO -rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 1700 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/CHANGELOG -rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 18007 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/COPYING -rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 1098 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/BLURB -rwxr-xr-x charlesc/qcc 26286 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/queue_repair.py

To check if there are issues fixable within the qmail queue it’s as easy as:

linux:/usr/local/src# cd queue-repair-0.9.0 linux:/usr/local/src/queue-repair-0.9.0# ./queue-repair -t ... checking files... checking queue/mess files... checking split locations...

The tool will walk through the mail sub-directories containing mail queued files in /var/qmail/queue and will list any issues found.
It’s recommended that the qmail server is stopped before any queue modify operations are issued on the server:

linux:/usr/local/src# qmailctl stop ...

Further on in order to solve any found issues with the queue, there is the “-r”/repair option:

linux:/usr/local/src/queue-repair-0.9.0# ./queue-repair -r ...

Another tool which comes handy whether a repair of a messed qmail queue is needed is qmhandle – http://sourceforge.net/projects/qmhandle/

The use of qmhandle is also pretty easy, all one has to do is to follow the usual classical steps of a download the source & compile:

linux:/usr/local/src# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmhandle-1.3.2.tar.gz linux:/usr/local/src# tar -zxvvf qmhandle-1.3.2 ... linux:/usr/local/src# cd qmhandle-1.3.2

Once again it’s necessery that the qmail server is stopped via its init script before qmHandle tool is used, e.g.:

linux:~# qmailctl stop ...

There is a difference between qmail queue repair tool and qmail handle , while qmail queue-repair tool is used to fix improper permissions of queued files with the qmail queue, qmhandle ‘s application is to completely delete the stored mail contents of a broken queue.

Deleting all the qmail queue content is in some cases the only option to fix the queue.
Often such a drastic measure is required after a heavy mail server overload, let’s say a result of spammers or caused by virus infected mail users which send a massive amounts of spam mails.

Thus at many cases when queue-repair was unable to solve a queue mess, I use qmhandble and sacrifice all the queued emails by completely wiping them out like so:

linux:/usr/local/src/qmhandle-1.3.2# ./qmhandle -D ...

Above command would eradicate all queued emails. Hopefully after the qmail server gets launched again with qmailctl start all the mail server operations should be back to normal.

Note that the use of qmhandle’s queue delete capabilities is pretty dangerous, if you forgot to stop the qmail server before issuing the above command!

Note that in order to use both qmHandle and queue-repair tools you will need to install python interpreter as both of the tools are written in python.

To check what is currently in the queue in Qmail, there are also native tools available, as you should probably know if you have dealt with qmail, e.g.:

debian:~# qmail-qstat debian:~# qmail-qstat messages in queue: 2 messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0

Often when there are problems with Qmail and more specificly with qmail server queue the qmail-qstat command does show messages in queue, however when an attempt to check what kind of messages are in the queue with qmail-qread no messages are shown, for instance below you see an example of that, even though qmail-qstat claims 2 messages are in the queue, qmail-qread is unable to list the messages:

debian:~# qmail-qread debian:~#

If all is fine with qmail queue above’s qmail-qread command should have returned something similar to:

debian:~# qmail-qread 26 May 2011 07:46:47 GMT #659982 3517 <hipo@www.pc-freak.net> remote somemail@gmail.nl 26 May 2011 07:46:47 GMT #659983 3517 <hipo@www.pc-freak.net>

2. Fixing qmail queue manually This is very dangerous initiative, so before you try anything, make sure that you know what you’re doing, the possibility that you make the situation worst if you attempt to tamper manually the qmail queue is quite high 🙂

However if you’re still convinced to try fixing it manually, take a look at /var/qmail/queue it’s very likely that there are permission issues with some of the queued files, in order to fix the situation it’s necessery that the following directories:

/var/qmail/queue/mess/ /var/qmail/queue/remote/ /var/qmail/queue/bounce /var/qmail/queue/info

gets explored with midnight commander / mc or some kind of convenient file explorer.

If there are queued files owned by users different from qmailq and user group qmail , for instance if owned by the root user, a simple chown qmailq:qmail to the wrong permissions file, should be able to resolve the issues.

Apart from all I explain above, there are many other ways suggested online on howto clean a qmail queue, one very popular one is using James’s qfixq shell script.

This script as of this very date is not working on Debian based systems, the script is dedicated initially to run on Fedora and Redhat based Linuces

Moreover myy experience with qfixq was never successful.

One very important note which is often a cause of many problems, is always make sure you stop and start the qmail server with an interval of at least of 10 seconds.

I’ve managed many servers which after an immediate (undelayed) qmailctl stop and qmailctl start was unable to run the whole engine of the qmail server (and either email sending or email receiving was not properly working) afterwards.

In that cases many weird behaviours are common, consider this seriously if you deal with the qmail-queue, it might happen that even if you have fixed your qmail queue, after a restart the qmail might breaks up.
I’ve experienced this kind of oddities numerous times, thus when I do changes to qmail I always make sure I restart the server a couple of times (at least 5 times 😉 ) always with a good delay between the HUPs.

And as always with qmail prayer is always needed, this server is complex, you never know what will happen next 🙂

Tags: aim, automatic tools, binaries, BLURB-rwxr-xr-x, ca software, COPYING-rw-r--r-, debian package, default, download, everybody, handy tools, init, Linux, mail bomb, mess, necessery, new patches, occasions, option, package, piece, python, qcc, qmailctl, queue, queues, quot, repair, rock, routine tasks, script, servant, simple changes, software queue, tar gz, tool, wget, zxvvf
Posted in Linux, Qmail, System Administration | 3 Comments »

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