Jesin's Blog

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Using Sendmail on Windows

Windows 88 Comments

The PHP mail function is a wonderful feature of PHP but like all good things in life this function also has many drawbacks. On a Linux  platform it requires sendmail to be installed, but coming to windows a SMTP server is needed to send email. So if you take a peak inside the php.ini file you’ll find the following line

[mail function]
; For Win32 only.
SMTP = localhost
smtp_port = 25

But the limitation here is you can only specify the SMTP server name and port, if the server requires authentication there is no provision for specifying the username and password. So unless you have a mail server configured to send local email without authentication there is no way to use the php mail() to send emails.Continue Reading…

How to use custom php.ini files on shared hosting

PHP 9 Comments

The advantages of using php with apache web server are many. The wonderful file named .htaccess makes things easier by allowing the webmaster (thats you!) to play around with many settings which would otherwise need the php.ini to be edited. This is a boon for people having their websites hosted on a shared server. Such people can’t even dream of editing the php.ini file located on their web hosting provider’s server. Thus the concept of custom php.ini was born. Webmasters who have their website hosted on a server with support for custom php.ini can create a php.ini within their directory and provide all the necessary settings they require. But custom php.ini doesn’t work out-of-the-box. This article explains how to use custom php.ini on a shared hosting server.Continue Reading…

How to reset the Joomla Administrator password

PHP Leave a Comment

A decade ago we were worrying about where we kept our car/house/company keys and as our wealth grew we had to manage more number of keys. Come back to the current world world we live now and the situation doesn’t get any better, the only difference is we need to manage our key to our online world aka the password. From emails to bank accounts, forums to social networking websites we have a whole paragraph of  passwords and the situation worsens when you become a web designer/webmaster. A password for your web hosting account, one for the domain control panel another for your CMS and the list goes on. So it won’t take a long time before you click on that “Forgot Password” button.

Alright enough of storytelling lets get to business. So you’ve forgotten your joomla administrator password and you can’t find that much needed “Forgot Password” link on the joomla administrator login. Now what do you do, read this article further.Continue Reading…

Password Protect directories using .htpasswd

Web Servers 2 Comments

Anything uploaded to the document root (www, htdocs, public_html folder) of your web server is visible to the public that is why its always recommended to store confidential information outside the document root. But if you want that information to be accessed by selected people then you need to put it in a directory inside the document root and password protect it. Even thought server side languages like PHP and ASP can be used to handle authentication it can be cumbersome. So the htaccess and htpasswd can be used to simplify the whole process and make your life easier. Lets go step-by-stepContinue Reading…

Setting up Network Load Balancing (Single Network Adapter)

Windows 5 Comments

Network load balancing is an excellent feature of the Microsoft Server Family operating systems. It allows the setup to make use of a single IP address to balance the load between two or more machine. In this article I’ll explain step by step on how to setup network load balancing on Windows Server 2003 using a single network adapter. For testing whether this configuration works I’ve setup IIS (Internet Information Services) but testing can also be done some other way.

The basic requirements for setting up Network Load Balancing:-

  • Two or more servers running the same service (e.g. IIS)
  • Both the servers should have a Windows Server Operating System installed.
  • IIS should be installed and running on both the servers.
  • The IP addresses for both the servers should be static i.e. manually assigned (DHCP should not be used)Continue Reading…

Setting a Timezone in PHP

Web Servers 1 Comment

Using the javascript date/time function is easy because its a client-side language so it displays your system time. But its not the same case with PHP. Since its a server-side language it displays the server’s time which can be irritating because you might have your server located in another country and you might live somewhere else. But changing the timezone is just a few clicks away and whats more, you can even set different timezones for different pages/directories.Continue Reading…

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