Interversal Blog - Plesk, MySQL, SQL Server, PHP and all the web technologies in one site

Ok, here’s the command I use to exclude .zip files from my zips

zip -r *.zip myzipfile directorytozip -x "*.zip"

Working on one’s own sites is much more fun that other peoples. The Internet is huge, and SEO is fascinating. I know where the rest of my life is going to be spent

PS Googling ‘fascinating‘ is fascinating.

Well, I’ve been working with Making Plans Ltd for about 4 years now. They’re nice people, honest, and make good employers.
If you’re ever in the market for a Floor Plan for your home, you know, like the ones they have on posters in Real Estate windows, these are your guys, you sketch it, and fax it to them, and they send back pretty looking floor plans,

Glenn

I had an external hard drive crash last year, and recently, we had an external hard drive case fail in the office. So, I decided to marry the two remaining components in a fit of screws and twisted metal.

Why twisted metal? Because, as I found out, just swapping out hard drives in external enclosures isn’t as easy as swapping drives out of PCs. No.

Each enclosure had it’s collection of pull-here’s, push-there’s, unscrew this, remove this sticker to reveal the screw, and yank at this bit for a while.
They both finally gave up their drives, but, after putting all the bits and pieces together again, I was left with bits and pieces that had fallen or snapped off.

Why can’t these things be easier?

I’ve done years of MS Acccess development, for private and government departments. And from a user perspective, there’s always one key bit of advise I give everyone when they get in to trouble.

"Make a mistake, hit Escape’.
"Then hit it again, and again".

You’d be amazed how many problems this solves. So, for any one out there using SAAP NDCA’s Smart, remember, make a mistake, hit escape

PS, I worked on SMART from Version 3.0 through to 4.1
Good luck to any and all who try to develop for her

Well, the simplest way, is just to pop3 all of the mail to a mailbox on a hard drive, then just upload it all to an IMAP set up on the new mailbox, very simple.
In fact, even simpler, is if they are both IMAP, and just drag all the mail from one to the other.

Ok, this one took me a while to figure out, after stuffing around with all sorts of .htaccess files, and being certain that mod_rewrite was in fact on, I was ready to give up. I was seeing:

Error 500, server config error and all sorts.
I knew I’d gotten some wordpress blogs running with SEF, so I just grabbed it’s .htaccess file:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

And, amazingly, it worked.

Let’s hear it for wordpress! ( written on a wordpress blog no less )

After buying a 1and1 managed server, and signing up for two years, I discovered that even in the days of MySQL 5.0, these managed servers are set to use MySQL 4.0,
This sucks for alot of reasons, the main one being the pain in the arse it is to migrate other MySQL databases back to 4.0

After stuffing around at the command line using options like
mysqldump -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` -p –skip-opt –create-options –compatible=mysql40 –add-drop-table –default-character-set=latin1 mydb > db.sql

It turns out that a bug in mysql4.1 screws up the creation of auto_increment when exporting with compatible=mysql40

Basically this means that if I export from mysql4.1 to mysql4.0, I have to manually add the AUTO_INCREMENT field type to each of the primary keys in the table. And since I’ve had alot of databases to move, each with up to 100 tables, I didn’t really fancy the idea.

So, after stuffing around I found a work around.

Export as normal from phpmyAdmin,

Do a find and replace on the SQL
Find: DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
And Replace With:

That is just delete all occurances of: DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

Then find: timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
And replace with: timestamp NOT NULL

This seems to do the trick

Worked for a Joomla on 4.1 to 4.0 database conversion
Worked for Zen Cart 1.2.6 to mysql 4.1 to 4.0
Worked for b2Evolution mysql 4.1 to 4.0 database conversion
Worked for Mambo 5 mysql 4.1 to 4.0 database conversion
 

I’m always having to look up and figure out all this mysql stuff online. So I’m going to save my favourite commands here. I’ll try to include versions where I can…. Stay tuned.

OK, exporting ( dumping from a MySQL database ) in Plesk

mysqldump -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` –add-drop-table –add-drop-database  –default-character-set=latin1 mydb > db.sql

This bit `cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` grabs your PLESK MySQL password.

Add –add-drop-table if you’ll be exporting over an existing database or tables

Add –add-drop-database if you’ll be exporting over an existing database

mydb is the database you want to export from.

db.sql is the file you want to export to.

To import the file in to a database, connect to MySQL on your server

Go to the directory that has your db.sql file that you’re going to be importing

mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` -p

Then enter the password

If you’re importing in to a new database:
The type in USE mydatabasename
Where mydatabasename is the name of the database you’re writing over

now type source db.sql;

remember to put the semi colon in there,
You should see a whole lot of
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
Lines, which is fine. Just wait it out and your import should complete all by itself.