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Monthly Archives: March 2014

Shorewall Firewall and Webmin

Webmin makes certain things easy when managing remote Unix/Linux servers, some things it makes more difficult if only because its modules don’t get updated very often. Shorewall makes managing large iptables rule sets easy but it’s Webmin interface is outdated. For instance the Blacklist section in the Shorewall Webmin Module directs to ‘/etc/shorewall/blacklist’ which according to the Shorewall documentation: ‘The blacklist file is used to perform static blacklisting by source address (IP or MAC), or by application. The use of this file is deprecated and beginning with Shorewall 4.5.7, the file is no longer installed.’

The Shorewall Webmin module still directs the user to this file for modification and because of this changes are not effected. The file you should be looking at is ‘/etc/shorewall/blrules’ as documented here.

Compile Error with PHP 5.5.10 on Centos 6.3

When attempting to compile PHP on Centos 6.x, you might run into a compile error such as:
php pdo/php_pdo.h: No such file or directory
and
php pdo/php_pdo_driver.h: No such file or directory

These files do exist, just not in the location that the configure script looks for them. There are two ways to fix this, the first would be to modify the configure script to look in the proper place and the second would be to create two symbolic links for the rogue files. I chose the second method.

The files are in *ext/pdo/, but the configure script looks in *pdo/ so we want to make the pdo directory and create the links within:

make clean
mkdir pdo
ln -s ext/pdo/php_pdo.h pdo/php_pdo.h
ln -s ext/pdo/php_pdo_driver.h pdo/php_pdo_driver.h

OR, more simply…

ln -s ./ext/pdo

Now re-configure and compile. Done.