Posted by alex
on January 21, 2004
It’s amazing that there are still coders out there who have never heard of diff and patch. I’m helping out at a website, and I was asked to install a few “hacks” into the bulletin board software.
After unpacking the archive containing the hacks I almost burst into tears. These “hacks” look like this:
**********************************
OPEN ROOT/index.php
**********************************
Find:
if ($bbuserinfo['userid']!=0) {
Add after it:
$storepoints=$bbuserinfo['storep'];
Find:
} else {
$welcometext = "";
Add after it:
$storepoints="0";
Sweet mother of god, what the HELL were you thinking? The whole document is 32kb long, all in the same vein. Why, oh why, didn’t you just make a diff of the sources?
Oh right, probably because you’re one of those obnoxious Windows PHP “programmers” (and I use that term very loosely).
To top it off, the archive contained 12 different hacks, all in the same braindead format.
And we have to use this proprietary bulletin board system *cough*vbulletin*cough*, because “we already paid for it, and because of all those cool hacks”.
This makes me wonder, why is there no easily extendable bulletin board software available? And with “easy”, I mean, through plug-ins, not through messing with the core program.
I guess that’s one more thing on my things-to-code-when-you-have-the-time list…
Posted by alex
on January 17, 2004
Wow, this blog has been deserted for quite a while…
Anyway, as a followup to my last entry, I am no longer jobless. Since the beginning of the year, I am now a freelance web developer.
This move also calls for a server upgrade, since my old (or rather, current) server has not been the most reliable. So I’m also going to switch hosting companies. I found one that offers quite beefy servers, reasonable free traffic and a wide range of distros to choose from.
Unfortunately, that is kind of a problem. My server distro of choice so far was Red Hat 7.3: stable, reliable, and I could get qmail and bgware RPMs at Bruce Guenter’s site. But Red Hat 7.3 has been EOLd at the end of December 2003, so there will be no more official security updates from Red Hat for that distro. And the newest release, 9, will be EOLd at the end of April this year.
Now Red Hat only offers the free Fedora linux (bleeding edge, new release every 6 month, 12 month lifetime) and the Enterprise Linux line (5 years lifetime). Unfortunately, the Enterprise ES version for small and mid-size servers costs $349 a year, which I just cannot afford at the moment.
I tried out Debian on my test server at home, because that would be the next logical step, but, alas, I got used to the Red Hat way. So, here’s the plan:
The qmail-to-postfix switch is almost done on my testserver, I have been able replicate almost all functionality of the old qmail/vpopmail setup, and postfix even offers some more stuff, like TLS for SMTP. With a MySQL backend, I now have POP3, IMAP and SMTP-AUTH working, all that remains to be done is to write a few perl scripts for easy domain and account management and a qmailadmin-like web frontend.
Since getting everything to work smoothly together required getting the info from a few websites, I’m going to document it, so it will be all in one place.