Mr N

Ever searched a set of files under Windows XP knowing that the search string you are looking for is there, but having the machine tell you it can't find anything?

This is caused by Windows trying to be too clever for its own good. If a file ends with a particular extension, then it looks for a filter that knows how to search that particular type of file and gives you back some useful results. In principle this is not a bad idea but they neglected to set a default on the file type system. If you do a lot of programming, then there are a lot of files which are text but end with an extension that is not recognised e.g. (*.c, *.java, *.php). Even if you associate the file with a text reader it doesn't make any difference.

There is a Microsoft Support document explaining how to correct this problem but it's not very easy to find. I have added the guts of it here so that others won't have to waste as much time as I did looking for it.

Microsoft say there are two ways to correct the problem: change the registry to add a text filter to that extension, or a set a default for all file types.

Adding an extra filter is a waste of time as you will only have to do the same thing again next time it happens.

Things can get lost in the ether so am taking a copy of the Microsoft page and reposting it here:

1. Click Start, and then click Search. If your Start bar doesn't have Search, then load Explorer and click the Search button at the top. Or click the task bar and press F3.
2. Click Change preferences
3. Click With Indexing Service (for faster local searches). If you already have indexing switched on, this will read Without Indexing Service.
4. Click Change Indexing Service Settings (Advanced). Note that you do not have to turn on the Index service.
5. On the toolbar, click Show/Hide Console Tree icon.
6. In the left pane, right-click Indexing Service on Local Machine, and then click Properties.
7. On the Generation tab, click to select the Index files with unknown extensions check box, and then click OK.
8. Close the Indexing Service console.

You don't have to log in again for the changes to take effect. And that's it - Happy Hunting!

Just come back from a week in San Francisco. Had a great time seeing the sights. Did the obligatory Alcatraz tour around the island, went on a cable car, watched a car drive too fast over a bump in the street and saw sparks flying out as its exhaust scraped along the ground.

There are 2 things we did that we really enjoyed.

We ate at King of Thai Noodle House about 3 times during our stay. The food was served in a canteen style but with table service. You could see the chefs cooking the food, which arrived at your table in about 5 minutes, delivered by an army of waitresses.

For an afternoon we hired a GoCar (on Beach Street) and drove around the city. A GoCar is a 3 wheeled cart wrapped around a moped engine. It has 2 seats, 3 wheels (2 at the front and 1 at the back) and a small boot. The cart is fitted with a GPS programmed with a guided tour of the city. While you are driving down the road, as well as giving you directions it tells you about the places and structures you are passing. You can take as many detours as you like and go where you want. It was top fun!

I can't wait until Google does the Street View for the rest of the world.

Just upgraded the server software from Plesk 8.2 to Plesk 8.3. The upgrade installed over a new version of Horde which over wrote all my changes made in Training SpamAssassin, Horde, IMAP, Plesk user configuration, so I just added them back in. Reminder to self, I must tell the Horde team about the changes, so I don’t have to keep changing it on each update! After the upgrade, the installer stopped SpamAssassin and the POP3 service, so I had to start them by hand. As a Unix bod I loath having to reboot a machine after an upgrade, but felt that in this case (because 2 of the services weren’t quite right) I’d better bounce the machine just to make sure it came up properly before the little darlings get to work on Monday and find that everything has stopped working! Some time later, I discovered that the awstat program which calculates the web logs has a problem. It analyses the log every day, building up a picture of what has been going on. The problem is that you can no longer compare previous month’s results. The Monthly History section spans a year but only shows the current month’s information. I am working on a solution which, I’ll blog when I work out what it is!

When moving from Ensim to Plesk I noticed that all my PHP programs stopped working. Every relative pathed file I had added to a require() statement error'ed with the message:

open_basedir restriction in effect

I added the current directory ('.') to PHP's include_path but it didn't make any difference. After an awful lot of trial and error I worked out that the include_path was being ignored and the open_basedir was being used instead. This is different from the PHP documentation.

The PHP configuration has this whole idea of **Local Value** and **Master Value** and unfortunately they do not inherit. If the **Local Value** is specified and it does not include any of the **Master Value**'s then those **Master Value**s will not be counted (and vice-versa). Bummer, because Plesk specifies the open_basedir in the configuration specific file for each domain. Double bummer because every time you change a configuration option for your domain Plesk overwrites these configuration files, so it means that any changes that you make in there will be lost.

Luckily, Plesk have built in some protection to allow users of virtual hosts to use site specific options for PHP and/or Apache.

Apache's domain specific configuration file for your domain is located in:

/var/www/vhosts/your.domain/conf/httpd.include

It contains a line to include another virtual host's specific file. In here we can add the voodoo to take away our require / open_basedir problem by including the current directory in the search path.

Go to the conf directory and create a file called vhost.conf. Use your favourite editor (and if that is not vi or notepad2, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!) to add the following contents:

  
    php_admin_flag engine on
    php_admin_flag safe_mode on
    php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs:.:/php:/tmp"
  
  
    php_admin_flag engine on
    php_admin_flag safe_mode on
    php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs:.:/php:/tmp"
  

The new open_basedir contains:

1. /var/www/vhosts/your.domain/httpdocs and /tmp because they where in the **Master Value**.
2. . for the current directory which solves my relative path problems.
3. /php because it contains all the PHP functions which are common to more than one domain. There is another problem with Plesk, **Safe Mode**, shared include path directories and user permissions, but that's a blog for another time! If anyone asks nicely then, I'll write it up.

After making the changes restart the web server, and all should be well.

The documentation of require on the PHP website is incorrect with regards to require()'s behaviour. It says require() is just like include(), but it isn't. include() takes the include path from the PHP variable include_path, but require() does not. It takes it from the open_basedir variable.