Posts Tagged ‘database name’

Installing the phpbb forum on Debian (Squeeze/Sid) Linux

Saturday, September 11th, 2010

howto-easily-install-phpbb-on-debian-gnu-linux

I've just installed the phpbb forum on a Debian Linux because we needed a goodquick to install communication media in order to improve our internal communication in a student project in Strategic HR we're developing right now in Arnhem Business School.

Here are the exact steps I followed to have a properly it properly instlled:

1. Install the phpbb3 debian package
This was pretty straight forward:

debian:~# apt-get install phpbb3

At this point of installation I've faced a dpkg-reconfigure phpbb deb package configuration issue:
I was prompted to pass in the credentials for my MySQL password right after I've selected the MySQL as my preferred database back engine.
I've feeded my MySQL root password as well as my preferred forum database name, however the database installation failed because, somehow the configuration procedure tried to connect to my MySQL database with the htcheck user.
I guess this has to be a bug in the package itself or something from my previous installation misconfigured the way the debian database backend configuration was operating.
My assumption is that my previously installed htcheck package or something beforehand I've done right after the htcheck and htcheck-php packages installation.

after the package configuration failed still the package had a status of properly installed when I reviewed it with dpkg
I've thought about trying to manually reconfigure it using the dpkg-reconfigure debian command and I gave it a try like that:

debian:~# dpkg-reconfigure phpbb3

This time along with the other fields I've to fill in the ncurses interface I was prompted for a username before the password prompted appeared.
Logically I tried to fill in the root as it's my global privileges MySQL allowed user.
However that didn't helped at all and again the configuration tried to send the credentials with user htcheck to my MySQL database server.
To deal with the situation I had to approach it in the good old manual way.

2. Manually prepare / create the required phpbb forum database

To completet that connected to the MySQL server with the mysql client and created the proper database like so:

debian:~# mysql -u root -p
mysql>
CREATE database phpbb3forum;

3. Use phpmyadmin or the mysql client command line to create a new user for the phpbb forum

Here since adding up the user using the phpmyadmin was a way easier to do I decided to go that route, anyways using the mysql cli is also an option.

From phpmyadmin It's pretty easy to add a new user and grant privileges to a certain database, to do so navigate to the following database:

Privileges -> -> Add a new user ->

Now type your User name: , Host , Password , Re-type password , also for a Host: you have to choose Local from the drop down menu.

Leave the Database for user field empty as we have already previously created our desired database in step 2 of this article

Now press the "Go" button and the user will get created.

Further after choose the Privileges menu right on the bottom of the page once again, select through the checkbox the username you have just created let's say the previously created user is phpbb3

Go to Action (There is a picture with a man and a pencil on the right side of this button

Scroll down to the page part saying Database-specific privileges and in the field Add privileges on the following database: fill in your previosly created database name in our case it's phpbb3forum

and then press the "Go" button once again.
A page will appear where you will have to select the exact privileges you would like to grant on the specific selected database.
For some simplicity just check all the checkbox to grant as many privilegs to your database as you could.
Then again you will have to press the "Go" button and there you go you should have already configured an username and database ready to go with your new phpbb forum.

4. Create a virtualhost if you would like to have the forum as a subdomain or into a separate domain

If you decide to have the forum on a separate sub-domain or domain as I did you will have to add some kind of Virtualhost into either your Apache configuration /etc/apache2/apache2.conf or into where officially the virutualhosts are laid in Debian Linux in /etc/apache2/sites-available
I've personally created a new file like for instance /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysubdomain.mydomain.com

Here is an example content of the new Virtualhost:

<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin admin-email@domain.com
ServerName mysubdomain.domain.com

# Indexes + Directory Root.
DirectoryIndex index.php index.php5 index.htm index.html index.pl index.cgi index.phtml index.jsp index.py index.asp

DocumentRoot /usr/share/phpbb3/www/

# Logfiles
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/yourdomain/error.log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/yourdomain/access.log combined
# CustomLog /dev/null combined
<Directory /usr/share/phpbb3/www/>
Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews -Includes ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

In above Virtualhost just change the values for ServerAdmin , ServerName , DocumentRoot , ErrorLog , CustomLog and Directory declaration to adjust it to your situation.

5. Restart the Apache webserver for the new Virtualhost to take affect

debian:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now accessing your http://mysubdomain.domain.com should display the installed phpbb3 forum
The default username and password for your forum you can use straight are:

username: admin
password: admin

So far so good you by now have the PHPBB3 forum properly installed and running, however if you try to Register a new user in the forum you will notice that it's impossible because of a terrible ugly message reading:

Sorry but this board is currently unavailable.

I've spend few minutes online to scrape through the forums before I can understand what I have to stop that annoying message from appearing and allow new users to register in the phpbb forum

The solution came natural and was a setting that had to be changed with the forum admin account, thus login as admin and look at the bottom of the page, below the text reading Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group you will notice a link with Administration Control Panel
just press there a whole bunch of menus will appear on the screen allowing you to do numerous things, however what you will have to do is go to
Board Settings -> Disable Board

and change the radio button there to say No

That's all now your forum will be ready to go and your users can freely register and if the server where the forum is installed has an already running mail server, they will receive an emails with a registration data concerning their new registrations in your new phpbb forum.
Cheers and Enjoy your new shiny phpbb Forum 🙂

How to extract database from a whole MySQL database dump with sed

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

If you have a configured mysql dumps to be prepared regularly via cronjob
and you happen to experience crash or lost of data and need to restore only a certain
database from a whole bunch of MySQL data SCRIPT file letes say mysql-fulldump.sql, you might be wondering how.
Here is how:

# sed -n '/^-- Current Database: `DATABASE_NAME`/,/^-- Current Database: `/p' mysql-fulldump.sql > DATABASE_NAME.sql

Change DATABASE_NAME with whatever your required database name is.
mysql-fulldump.sql – is the name of whole database file dump file
DATABASE_NAME.sql – will contain the extracted database from complete SQL dump.
TThat's all, now import new dump to MySQL and Enjoy 🙂

Few MySQL helpful commands in MySQL maintenance (MySQL rename Table, Empty MySQL Table Contents / Null Table records, Get info about variables in a Table, Change record in existing MySQL table, Get MySQL table privileges info, Some basic commands for MySQL issues debugging)

Monday, March 29th, 2010

This days I’m playing with MySQL trying out stuff. I decided it could be helpful to somebody to share few things I learned. So there we go:

1. To Rename MySQL existent table name

RENAME TABLE old_table_name to new_table_name;

2. To completely wipe out the content of an existing Table in MySQL

TRUNCATE TABLE table_name; table_name = your table name to truncate

3. To RENAME column name in MySQL to another one

ALTER TABLE your_table_name CHANGE current_column_name new_column_name VARCHAR(100);

Note that in the above example to rename column in MySQL you should always specify the new column variable type e.g. VARCHAR(100) or anything else you like.

4. To get information about a table e.g. variables and there type in a MySQL table DESCRIBE table_name;

5. To change some Value in a Column to another one based on another value UPDATE table_name column_name SET column_name=’Lecturer’ WHERE other_column_name=’some_value’; Here; column_name = is your column name other_column_name = is some other column_name which you’re going to search in for a certain some_value content

6. To get a thorougful information about MySQL table, it’s variables and the privileges SHOW FULL COLUMNS from Table; Here Table should be your table name.

7. To get information about privileges of some mysql user SHOW GRANTS FOR your_user@host; 8. To create new user and grant certain privileges to some Database grant CREATE,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE,SELECT on database_name.* to username@localhost; set password for username@host = password('mysecretpassword');

Where: database_name = is your desired database username = is your user of choice CREATE,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE,SELECT = is your preferred privileges to the database_name for the selected username In case if you want to grant all possible user privileges that could be assigned to a table use the following code:

GRANT ALL ON database_name.* TO username identified by 'mysecretpassword' with grant option;

9. Another really helpful few commands on daily basis whever you’re responsible for MySQL server are:
SHOW warnings;
Which is always helpful in debugging in MySQL. And: SHOW status; SHOW processlist;
That two would inform you about the status of various key variables and could also be a precious debugging tool.

How to dump table from a selected database in MySQL

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

I’ve recently had to dump a few tables from MySQL database to do so I used mysqldump,here is how:

/usr/bin/mysqldump database_name table_name -u root -p > table_name.sql