cli

Checksum of file using Windows certutil

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After getting files from a remote source, it is often a good idea to get some sort of fingerprint or checksum of the file, and verify it against a known value published in a place or on a website you trust.

For Windows, this can be accomplished with:

certutil -hashfile filename.ext sha256

sha256 can be any of MD2 MD4 MD5 SHA1 SHA256 SHA384 SHA512

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Setting PHP.INI path (or file) for PHP CLI shell scripts

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Running a PHP script from the command-line, or CLI, is quite useful at times and is often used to perform some automated task, like a CRON cleanup script, to send out reminders, etc.

It’s common that these CLI scripts need some, but possibly not all, settings that are similar to the main application’s. I may, for example want to include the database configuration settings shared with the main application. So I often create a separate php.ini file for this purpose.

Running /usr/bin/php -c /my/very/special/path cronScript.php is simple enough, but what if I want to be able to create an “executable” PHP shell script? The obvious answer would be something like:

#!/usr/bin/php -c /my/very/special/path

at the top of the .php file, followed by my PHP code, right? Except that may not do what you want. I could not get the PHP interpreter to load anything in /my/very/special/path by using the above construct, even if it works from the actual command-line. After banging my head against the wall for a while, this turns out to work for these “shell scripts”:

#!/usr/bin/php -c=/my/very/special/path

Note the use of the = (equal) sign between the -c and the path (or file).

Carry on.

Forcing OutOfOffice response to always fire in Zimbra

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We had a need to create an e-mail account in Zimbra that would always generate an automated response to incoming e-mails. So we activated the OutOfOffice functionality (or “Vacation Mode” as some people prefer to call it). This is great, and you do have some control from the ZWC (Zimbra Web Client) user interface.

The “problem” with the OOO functionality is that it is designed for human interaction. So, in an attempt to be somewhat “intelligent”, Zimbra will remember to whom it has sent an automated response message, and if a second message is received within nn time, it will not send another one. This makes sense, if I have sent an e-mail to John Doe, and Mr Doe is on vacation, I probably know this to be true even if I send him another message within a few hours or days. So I don’t want a second automated response.

We wanted it to send an automated response every time it received a message, zmprov to the rescue!

As the ‘zimbra’ user, from the CLI prompt, enter:

zmprov ma acct@tobemod.com zimbraPrefOutOfOfficeCacheDuration <value>

 

The default <value> in our installation was 7d, presumably that means seven days. So I set it to ‘1s’ and anyone sending e-mail to acct@tobemod.com now gets an automated response, even if they send several messages within a short period of time.

wget segfault | wget segmentation fault

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We mirror the Webmin website to bring it somewhat closer to Sweden, and recently I had to move the hosted mirror to another of our servers running Debian 8. All of a sudden, a cron job that had been working for many years went tits up with a segmentation fault.

Odd, to say the least. It became even more strange when I turned on “verbose” (-v) output and wget told me that “UTF8 cannot be converted to UTF8”. This is a truly silly error message, imho. wget apparently knows the local encoding, and it apparently knows the remote encoding, so why is it attempting a conversion when there’s non conversion needed?#stupid

Hello?

Adding –no-iri to the wget command-line solves this issue.