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

  So way back in the beginning I developed a simple web file manager for our company that allowed us to upload files to a Linux server and share them w/ noncorporate users. Things worked great but I’ve been left maintaining the server even though I’m now playing Network Engineer.

  Well, as time has progressed, the requirement to upload ever bigger files has ballooned and it orginally was built for files around 500MB. So I did a quick php -i | grep php.ini to find where my php.ini file was and started editing the config. I quickly found upload_max_filesize and increased it to over a 1GB for file uploads. Next I found post_max_size and increased that to the same size. Quick restart of the apache server and I was off testing. Started to do some large file uploads and I started getting some errors. I placed some debug code in my php subroutine and low and behold, I was getting an error = 2. This particular error meant I hadn’t increased the HTML form attribute MAX_FILE_SIZE to 1GB either. Once I had all three attributes set to a higher setting I was GTG.

Couple quick links:

Talks about the HTML form input field MAX_FILE_SIZE:
http://www.tizag.com/htmlT/htmlupload.php

PHP move_uploaded_file function call over on php.net/manual. Has LOTS of good demo code below:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.move-uploaded-file.php

Actual PHP file upload errors one can get when using move_uploaded_file:
http://php.net/manual/en/features.file-upload.errors.php

  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