Rob Richards mentioned in a previous book review about some of the issues he was having getting the Oracle extension enabled on his Fedora 8 system. Well, he's come back after doing some more testing/compiling and has found some resolution to his issues.

I really didn't need to get it running, but the sheer fact that I tried it and it wouldn't work, pissed me off enough to spend some time getting it resolved. Hopefully this helps anyone else having the same problem. I am currently using instant client 11.1, but I did try the 10.2 version with the same results.

He steps through the process he followed - tracking down the missing libaio files, correcting an issue with SELinux loading the Oracle libraries and his realization: he just needed to allow text relocation. Included in the post are the command line calls that'd need to be made to make it all happen.

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.

The HowTo Forge website has a new installation tutorial posted today showing how to get the combination of Lighttpd, PHP5, MySQL and Fedora 7 up and running.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 7 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

There's about six steps to the process, including getting all of the packages. Thankfully, there's very little configuration you'll need to do. Since Lighttpd uses the FastCGI component to load in PHP support, there's no need for compiling. It's as easy as grabbing the packages and making them play nicely together. Configuration file changes (examples) are included to almost make it as easy as a cut & paste.

Via this Secunia advisory posted today, there's information about the update the Fedora Linux group has made to the PHP package included in their distribution. According to the release:

This fixes some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to bypass certain security restrictions and by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions and cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

The original advisory post has more details on what the update fixes as well as the link to download the RPM packages to update your system. You can either manually download them or use the "yum" system to handle things a bit more automatically.

As mentioned in this advisory on the Secunia website (reposted from the original advisory) the Fedora Linux group has posted an update for their PHP package to bring it up to date with the recent PHP 5.2.4 release.

Fedora has issued an update for php. This fixes a weakness and some vulnerabilities, where some have unknown impacts and others can be exploited by malicious users and malicious, local users to bypass certain security restrictions.

You can find the complete list of packages that were updated in their advisory posting and a brief mention of the easiest way for you to update your distribution (yum).

The HowTo Forge site has a new tutorial posted today for Fedora 7 users looking to keep their PHP installations a bit safer by installing the Suhosin patch from the Hardened-PHP Project.

I will install both Suhosin parts in this tutorial, the Suhosin patch (for which we need to recompile PHP5) and the Suhosin PHP extension. To see what Suhosin can do, please refer to http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/a_feature_list.html. The features of the Suhosin patch are listed under Engine Protection (only with patch); all the other features come with the Suhosin extension.

It's (technically) a three step process, but there's lots of smaller steps under each one. There's also some screenshots of a phpinfo() page to show the results of each of the steps.

In this new guide from the HowTo Forge, they show you how to build, from scratch, a complete LAMP system on top of the Fedora Core 6 distribution.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora Core 6 based server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, DNS server, FTP server, MySQL server, POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Fedora Core 6, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

The install uses Apache 2, MySQL 5, Postfix, BIND9, proftpd, dovecot, and Webalizer to round out the system. There's screenshots and steps the whole way, so you're sure to be able to follow along easily. PHP is installed via a package so it makes things simpler.

Robert Bolton installed his Apache web server and MySQL with almost no problem at all, but when it came to PHP5, there were a few issues. His goal? To set up a simple, clean installation that would would immediately with the Zend Framework.

he way ZF is currently set up, it really only works from the root directory of a site (you can use modified controller to get around this), although they are going to change the controller structure so it works in sub-directories in future releases.

He notes the changes he made to the hosts file to set up two different domains as well as the chnages to the httpd.conf to set them up. This also includes the Rewrite rules to funnel requests back down to the main controller. He also includes a vi setting to work with tab characters the same way as "recommended" by the Zend Framework - 4 spaces wide.

Over on FedoraNews.org today, there's a tutorial covering the installation of (of course) Fedora Core along with the latest versions of Apache, MySQL, and PHP (including MySQL support in PHP5).

I've been supporting over 80 MediaWiki wikis and half a dozen or so Wordpress blogs at Intuit, Inc. I started out on a couple of old Dell PCs with Mandrake. When they were overloaded, and that didn't take too long, I moved to an HP DL360 XEON Dual Processor server with 4 gig of RAM, redundant BIOS, 37 gig RAID 1, etc... A nice box.

So when the need arose to setup a server for another group, I dusted off one of those old Dells and decided to figure out how to do it right - with all the latest versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP, and all working together nicely. It took me a few days to figure out, but I finally have a clean, working system.

They walk you through each step of the way, explaining what to get, where to get it from, how to install it, and what needs to be configured to get it all playing nicely together. They compile the PHP with a lot of extensions enabled - some not really needed by "normal" installs - but it's always good to have options. By the end, you should have a nice, fully-functional installation with a working web server that groks PHP.