In the latest post to his site, Ruslan Yakushev looks at some simple ways you can debug your PHP-based applications running on a Windows Azure platform.

The need to diagnose and troubleshoot application’s failures often comes up during deployment to a hosting environment. Some configuration settings in hosting server may differ from what application expects. Often it is not as easy to figure out the cause of the problem in a hosting environment as it is on a development machine. I found the following techniques useful when troubleshooting errors in PHP applications hosted in Windows Azure Web Sites.

He shares seven different tips, some pretty simple, others a bit more difficult requiring other software to be up and working:

• Using phpinfo()
• Checking the wincache settings
• Looking at your error logs
• Turning on the display_errors setting
• Turning on HTTP logging, detailed errors and failed request tracking in the control panel
• Using XDebug
• Getting the statistics for your ClearDB instance

Aide (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) is described as "a free replacement for Tripwire. It does the same things as the semi-free Tripwire and more." So, of course, one of the useful things that it does is output logs to help you keep track of what's happening on your system. In this new post on the PHP-Tools blog, they talk about the parsing of these same logs - with a little help from PHP.

Since we started hosting our sites on our own server we had some nasty cracker-attacks. To at least have a chance recognizing whether the system had been compromised we started to use aide some time ago. Aide keeps track of changes in the filesystem and provides us with a human-readable report once a day.

They note, though, that sometimes it's a valid change and not a security issue, so they employed the Util_AideAnalyzer package to help parse the logs into something useful. They give an example of what this looks like, including variations getting more specific data on certain aspects. They also point you in the right direction to get the Util_AideAnalyzer package installed on your system.

Aide (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) is described as "a free replacement for Tripwire. It does the same things as the semi-free Tripwire and more." So, of course, one of the useful things that it does is output logs to help you keep track of what's happening on your system. In this new post on the PHP-Tools blog, they talk about the parsing of these same logs - with a little help from PHP.

Since we started hosting our sites on our own server we had some nasty cracker-attacks. To at least have a chance recognizing whether the system had been compromised we started to use aide some time ago. Aide keeps track of changes in the filesystem and provides us with a human-readable report once a day.

They note, though, that sometimes it's a valid change and not a security issue, so they employed the Util_AideAnalyzer package to help parse the logs into something useful. They give an example of what this looks like, including variations getting more specific data on certain aspects. They also point you in the right direction to get the Util_AideAnalyzer package installed on your system.