Geek projects, tidbits and things I'm working on at the moment…

  One of my relatives, whom I’m hosting a WordPress site for, recently forgot their administrator password and couldn’t get into their WordPress Dashboard. I of course being the server provider was able to see the actual user table where their account was stored inside of MySQL but wasn’t able to interpret the password since it’s stored as a hash. We tried several times to retrieve the password using the “Lost your password?” option on the user login screen but I guess his work was filtering the emails. So, I started doing some digging around. A number of folks said to use PHPMyAdmin to manipulate the database that’s connected to the WordPress blog and change it that way. To that I reply, “Over my dead body.” I refuse to install PHPMyAdmin on a production machine since it simply opens up yet another attack vector. So digging a little bit deeper past the PHPMyAdmin recommendations I found the emergency.php script for WordPress. Essentially this is a drop-in PHP page that you FTP to your website, use it once and quickly delete it! It allows you to reset your WordPress admin account password for those times when you’ve forgotten the password. Again, I can’t say it enough, remove the file afterwards else someone else stumbles upon your emergency.php page and resets your password w/o your authorization!

Couple of links that might be helpful:

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/the-agony-of-the-lost-wordpress-password/
http://codex.wordpress.org/Resetting_Your_Password
http://codex.wordpress.org/User:MichaelH/Orphaned_Plugins_needing_Adoption/Emergency

Moving lots of data:I do all sorts of networking related stuff and one of the few things I do often are server migrations. So eventually, there comes a time for me to copy a large amount of data from one server to another while maintaining the file permissions and structure. That’s where tar & ssh come into play. If I’m moving a users’ home directory from one server to another I usually use tar & ssh together via a pipe and let it copy off the files perfectly.

tar zcvf - jsmith | ssh "destinations IP" "cd /home/; tar zpxvf -"

Within seconds of the command starting off, you’ll be asked for the password for your ssh session. Then, the data will get flung across the network to the destination folder. Works great!

Verifying Apache Configuration:When adding additional Virtual Hosts to your Apache config file it’s nice to make sure they’ve been picked up correctly (or! that you’ve modified the right httpd.conf file!) A simple way of letting Apache tell you what it’s going to use is via the -t option.

httpd -t -D DUMP_VHOSTS

It parses the running configuration and dumps the virtual hosts a nice readable format. You can also use “DUMP_MODULES” to see a list of the modules it will use which can be useful for whether or not that database module is going to be loaded or not.

MySQL database dump:It never fails, when doing a migration you’re going to need to dump your databases from a MySQL DB into another DB on your newer system. If they’re the same version however you can run mysqldump w/ a couple command-line switches and then import them on the new server.

mysqldump -u root -p --databases "your DB here" > dbfilename.sql

After you’ve moved your database file to the new server you can then import it in via:

mysql -u root -p -D "your DB here" < /path/to/dbfilename.sql

Keep in mind, we’re assuming you’ve already created the database inside your new MySQL server and will assign it proper permissions so your end user can connect to it!

Just a couple quickies for today’s post.

As always, a couple useful links:

http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-create-a-mysql-database-and-set-privileges-to-a-user

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum49/723.htm

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysqldump.html

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/default-privileges.html