The Developer Tutorials blog has posted a new tutorial covering how to scan ports and checking a remote service's status with PHP.

Having access to the current status of public servers can empower your applications to make decisions and respond to problems automatically. Acknowledging a service is offline can also save endless support emails. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to keep track of your server status by scanning ports on your server with PHP.

They show how to check a remote instance (a socket open with a timeout) and how to run through a list of ports, looping from one to one-thousand and running an fsockopen on each. They make a sample script to show these two combined - a simple page that loops through the common protocols (HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc) and checks to see if the remote machine is running something on that port.

On DevShed today, there's a new tutorial on showing how to create a simple application to use one of the simpler protocols - FTP.

PHP has many functions that help us to implement Internet and/or networking protocols. In this article, we will look at how to implement some of those protocols using PHP.

They introduce the FTP functions for PHP (a basic list, PHP manual style) and include the code - the CSS to make it easier to use and the PHP code to make the FTP connection and grab the remote file listing. A screenshot is included to give you an idea of the end result.

Jacques Marneweck points out a tutorial he came across showing how to perform an installation of the PEAR library system on a shared host.

This is quite useful when you are forced into using a clueless shared host who only have the bare PEAR installation on their servers, and have not ever considered installing DB, Mail, Net_SMTP, etc. which lots of people use instead of reinventing the wheel with each project.

The steps of the tutorial are pretty simple and they include two different ways - installing it to your docroot directory if the web host already has the pear binary set up or using ftp/ftps/sftp to upload and install the needed files.

Jacob Santos has posted a list of things that he both likes and dislikes about one of Zend's beta offerings - Zend Neon.

I've been using Zend Studio Neon for the past three weeks and I have to say, for something that is free (beta software) it is quite good. Compared to using VS 2005, Zend Studio Neon has its advantages, since Visual Studio doesn't handle PHP well. Zend Studio Neon also has areas that I didn't like.

His likes included the fact that it's not Eclipse (technically) and that it supports PHPUnit and PHPDocumentor out of the box. Dislikes included the fact that it might not be free in the future and that it lacks FTP support.

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 Web Development Blog has posted a quick tutorial on how to make an FTP upload via cURL through a simple PHP script.

FTP hosting is often much cheaper than regular web hosting. The upload with an ftp client is for sure the most common way, but could be a problem for people behind a firewall or without enough rights (capabilities) to install a FTP client. For those a upload via a web form is the best solution.

They mention how to change the upload limitations on your server (for those with access to the php.ini file) and some sample code showing how to make the connection to a remote domain and push the file up over FTP.

Secunia has posted a vulnerability marked as "highly critical" for users of any of the Avaya products that use PHP:

Avaya has acknowledged some vulnerabilities in various Avaya products, where some have unknown impacts and others can be exploited by malicious users to bypass certain security restrictions and potentially by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system.

The following products are affected:

• Avaya Communication Manager (CM 4.0 and CM 2.x prior to load 127.0)
• Avaya CCS/SES (CCS/SES 3.1.1)
• Avaya AES (AES 4.0)

Currently, according to the original announcement from Avaya, there are two issues that have been found and are able to be exploited - an issue with the xmlrpc extension and a problem with the ftp extension. Currently, there is no patch to correct these issues, but you can keep track of their current status via their entries

In a new post to the JSLabs blog today, Justin Silverton mentions a FTP server that's been created entirely in PHP - nanoFTP.

nanoFTPd is an ftp daemon written in php. as of version 4.2.0, php supports the command-line interface (stable since 4.3.0), which nanoFTPd relies on. nanoFTPd is modular, so it's easy to add custom modules and other stuff, like different database interfaces (currently supports mysql and postgresql).

Features of the app include user authentication via a database or text file, dynamic IP support, and most of the usual FTP goodies you're used to in a server. You'll need at least PHP 4.2.0 to get it up and running, but configuration is simple and installations it just as easy. You can grab the software from their website.

On PHPBuilder.com today, there's a new tutorial spotlighting the use of the cURL library with PHP:

cURL is one of the most powerful PHP extensions. It stands for Client URL, and allows you to communicate with other servers using a wide range of protocols. Perhaps that sounds fairly uninteresting, but give it some more thought.

As food for thought, they give a few examples of the use of this handy library - a script to look up the meaning of a word, how to access password protected pages, getting the information about a file from a remote server, posting to a remote script, and FTPing a file to a remote server. This flexible library allows all of these without making things overly complex and unmanageable.

You can check out the full list of features for the extension on this page of the PHP manual.

Felix Geisendorfer has an interesting little solution posted to his blog today for those wanting to sync a Subversion repository over to a remote FTP folder without having to mess with external software (well, besides CakePHP, that is).

As the headline says, this time it's going to be my SVN/FTP Deployment Task written for the new Bake in CakePHP 1.2. It will not work with the Cake 1.1.x.x branch, and I currently do not have time to explain the procedure to work around this.

The key, in fact, is the new Bake that's included with this new version. When combined with the code it will push the contents of the directory out to the remote server. There's even some included code to make a pseudo-install to your remote server.