Forum updates
The OpenVMS forum – using phpBB – has been disabled due to the amount of bogus users that was added using direct access using the web interface. This aought to be prevented by the software, but the current version (2.0.22) has no such facilities. A fellow site supposed an addition to PHPBB named User_Shield that was installed this weekend. The product recommends installation using EasyMOD so in fact TWO modules needed to be installed.
However, it wasn’t very straightforward; the main reason was the way the forums have been set up, but also the security settings which are different on VMS than on Unix.
The forum software is located on one directory, and this can be accessed using the operator web. It requires authentication – for obvious resons – but access sto PHPBB ciode is immediate.To install EasyMod, that is a requirement. Installation also requires the correct URL and domain, a user to access the base directory and WRITE access to all PHPBB files. Part of the installation of EasyMod (and perhaps, other rmodules using EasyMOD) is usage of FTP to copy files to the right places.
Since installation is done using the webserver, and, on VMS, it runs using a non-system account, files not owned by that account need to have W:RE protection (PHP doesn’t take ACL’s into account).
Here, some action was needed.
I added an account WEBMANAGER – normal user account in [200.*] group – that has the base directory as login directory. Next, I made this the owner of all PHPBB files. But since the web server itself is a different group, all files have now be set to W:RWE since some will be copied over in the process of installation.
For the forum, the basic template must be enabled – as stated in the manual.
Next, I could install EasyMod, and using that, installation of User_Shield was easy.
However, though the code is accessible, it could not be used properly in the OpenVMS forum.
This resides on a directory that has no mapping in the server’s configuration, like the blogs, for the same reasons. It’s real location is likewise referenced by a system logical, that is a search list: to the forum’s real location first (holding no more than just the configuration data) and the PHP location second. Because of that, installed additions are accessible by any forum. The data, stored in the MySQL database, will not be present in the OpenVMS forum database. An normal installation requires that the full structure and all files are present – and here, this is not the case. I could copy the whole structure and all files, but I could do all database additions manually, because there were just a few, and using phpmyadmin made it an easy task :).
After the job was done, I disuser’d WEBMANAGER, amd restored the security (all files W:RE). The only thing now is re-eanble the URL on the main page.
There is one more thing
to this that should be mentioned.
Both packages come in ZIP files (at least, I used these) and these seem to be Windows based: each line is terminated with <CR><LF> characters. Moving the files to OpenVMS and unzipping them there implies some errors that can hardly be tracked down due to the fact the files are practically unreadable by humans.
It’s a better way to unzip the files on the PC and copy them to the right position on VMS using FTP, in ASCII mode. It makes your life a lot easier.
Lost images
I found that a number of uploaded files seem to be missing. Luckily, some were still available on the workstation but one, showing a phishing attempt as from PayPal, is still missing and I had to edit the posting that contains the reference.
What caused the loss – perhaps the corruptioin of the disk container?
MySQL does BOOM again
MySQL crashed again, when flusing the data (it looks so) and I lost the reference to the right template. It turned out the watchedog procedure doesn’t work properly if MySQL isn’t up-and-running: there is no entry oin the batchqueue any more…And because logging is disabled, there is no clue on what caused it to disappear…The procedure has now started again.