Coding

I have been using Scotchbox for a while now and continue to be impressed by it’s simplicity and ease of use compared to other Vagrant environments I have used in the past. Recently I started working on a Drupal 8 project that required the use of a PostGreSQL (PostGres) database. Thankfully, when I checked the Scotchbox 2.0 documentation, it appeared that PostGres came packaged up with the environment and ready to use. After doing a little bit of research I realized I needed to follow a couple of steps in order to get this running properly with a PostGres client. I am outlining the steps below. ...

Last week, I was thinking about registering a new domain name for my new project. My first choice was GoDaddy. I had shortlisted a few TLDs from GoDaddy, but I was not able to buy a domain name for less than 10$. GoDaddy runs a promotion wherein new customers can register a TLD for USD 0.99. I’ve been using GoDaddy for three years. Hence, I was not eligible for this offer. ...

403 access forbidden error message is displayed on the browser when you try to open a file whose public access has been blocked by the webmaster or because of a permission problem. In other words, the web server is saying that you are not allowed to view the file. If you’re a webmaster (blogger) and if you’re facing this issue, then it ’s obvious that you don’t have much experience in web server configuration and management. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Let’s understand these two issues in detail. ...

TTFB aka first-byte time is nothing but the time taken by the first byte to reach the client machine when the client seeks a response from the server after the browser running on it makes an HTTP GET request. A small TTFB value indicates that your web server is fast. A high TTFB value denotes that your site is slow in responding to the browser’s HTTP GET request. To fix the problem, you’ll have to work on the code or check web server and DB configuration. ...

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that this site was throwing error establishing database connection or internal server errors last week. The issue which was caused by the Linux out of memory manager has now been fixed, and the site is now live 24 x 7. I’m using this server to host some other WordPress websites as well. Fixing the error was a very confusing task for me. To be honest, I didn’t know about OOM process killer in Linux. If I knew how this module worked, the error would have been fixed on the day the error message appeared the system log file. ...

Since two weeks, my website was frequently crashing because the MySQL server stopped abruptly at random times of the day. This issue started when I was on a holiday. My site was down for several hours. I configured crontab to start MySQL server when the service had stopped. This didn’t help. I enabled query cache to reduce the load on the server. I use NGINX Fast CGI cache, APCu, and OpCache for my sites. Thus, I didn’t felt the need to install a caching plugin for my WordPress blog. ...

The dreaded WordPress white screen of death means something has gone wrong and is preventing your website from loading. In most cases, the white screen of death will prevent both the front and back end from loading correctly and all you can see is a blank white screen in your web browser. The white screen of death is often caused by a faulty plugin or theme. In some cases, corrupt files, a database error, or a hosting issue could be the cause of the problem. ...

All my websites are hosted on an unmanaged VPS. The VPS has enough of RAM and a decent CPU. It can handle ten high traffic blogs. I had never faced any problems until last week when my website started displaying error establishing a database connection to the visitors instead of the content. This error was reported after I changed one of the table’s structure. Why the heck did I change the structure? Last week, I noticed Yarpp plugin displayed a message that I need to replace the table structure of my post content table from INNODB to MYISAM so that the plugin can display highly relevant related posts. So I changed the structure of my website’s DB table. ...

The use of malicious code attacks against web applications and more specifically, web enabled databases, is on the rise and continues to be a greater threat as systems become more complicated and reliant on third party libraries and frameworks. There are many different types of exploits and vulnerabilities associated with malicious code attacks which can potentially threaten the very databases that power such applications. Several areas of vulnerabilities are discussed below. ...

SQL injection has been a method of attacking databases through multiple tiers of application infrastructure for many years, MacVittie (2008). SQL or Sequential Query Language is a database language used to interact with large quantities of data, typically stored in tables inside a Relational Database Management System (DBMS). Each command using the SQL language typically generates a result set of data. An example of this follows: select * from accounts The (*) is effectively used to return (all) columns of data in the ‘accounts’ table. A similar, and more dangerous statement could be issued using the drop command: ...