In a new tutorial from DevShed today, they take a look at some of the "networking" functions that PHP has to offer - basically anything that can make a network connection.

PHP has a great many tools for interacting with a network and also with the Internet. In this article we will look at some of those tools and functions to see how we can use them to make our scripts more useful in a network environment.

They look at the fopen, gethostbyname, gethostbynamel, getservbyport and the Net_Whois PEAR package (among others).

On the HowTo Forge website, there's a new tutorial that walks through the complete steps of setting up a Fedora 8 linux server with a full LAMP stack complete with email, DNS, FTP and ISPConfig support. They call it the "Perfect Server".

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora 8 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Fedora 8, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

It's a seven page process with plenty of screenshots and settings to help make the installation nice and easy.

In a new post today, Arnold Daniels has posted about (and linked to) a few methods for running PHP4 and PHP5 on the same server at the same time - running them as CGIs.

You simply can't have PHP4 and PHP5 both run as Apache2 module in the same process, because they use a lot of the same internal symbols (variables, function names, etc). If you would change that, nobody would be able to write any extensions which run both on PHP4 and PHP5. However you can run multiple PHP versions as CGI modules and there is no patch required for that.

He points out an article from Giunta Gaetanos that handles it similarly, but requires the filename to match a certain pattern to determine which to use. He suggests a slightly different alternative, namely using different IPs for PHP4 vs PHP5 and use DNS to route the domains to the right locations.

There's a quick post on the bla.st blog about a handy method to create "pretty URLs" for your website without changing your code (much). With this example, it's all about Apache and mod_rewrite.

For our bla.st project, we decided to put all URLs through a single PHP script, and process them there. The advantage is then we can do what ever we want with the URLs.

They provide the settings and directives that you'll need to drop into Apache and what they're doing so you can customize them to your site. There's even a brief PHP example at the end showing how to get the information from the URL and into a usable form.