/opt/lampp/lampp start

where /opt/lampp is the location where XAMPP files are kept. You will have to substitute the path to your XAMPP in the above command.

Do let me know whether it worked for you

This is the latest one I received when I was testing a webservice client using PHP NuSOAP library.. Well my client’s webserver is still running on PHP4 so I cant use the built in SOAPClient for PHP5

I resolved this by modifying the usage of the NuSOAP soap client. Initially I tried a simple soap client when this error came, by when I tried the wsdl client, it worked fine. Change is only how you instantiate the soap client.

read more about cross site scripting (XSS) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_site_scripting

Here is the simple test to verify whether your web form is vulnerable to XSS or not.

Just type in

<script>alert(“Testing for XSS….. And this form is vulnerable to XSS”);</script>

Submit the form. Upon submitting the form, if you are seeing a javascript alert saying “Testing for XSS….. And this form is vulnerable to XSS” , obviously your web form is not secure against XSS attacks !!

Someone asked me a question – is there a simple way to install everything (Apache, MySQL PHP with necessary modules) in one shot without configuring each and everything manually.. I had no clue that time but I understood that there is a solution for this..

Just browsed http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html and found proof that there is a solution available.

Have you tried this? I have to mess up my server again if I have to test this So let me see when time permits

[Update] There wasn’t mysql enabled on PHP5 when I installed RHEL5 afresh. So I had to remove the rpms of PHP, stop httpd,vsftpd and mysqld forever. Installed XAMPP and everything is working perfectly now..

There is a bit of security issues in XAMPP (Not so big if you take care). So read their documents properly.

Meanwhile do check http://www.alt-php-faq.org/local/115/ which guides you to fight the spammers out. I had posted earlier regarding the same at Protect your Web Forms from email header injections , but here is the URL for the original article.

Following are the ones I found interesting and good ones to try..

http://quimby.gnus.org/circus/chart/chart-manual.php – This one is a very lightweight charting library which creates image charts.

http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php?menu=Download – With this one you can display dynamic charts in flash (requires flash player at client system)

http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/ – This is another charting library with lot of features with support for PHP4 and PHP5. Its not so light as the download size is about 4.5 MB (Yet to try this one due to this reason)

If you know/have used any other good PHP charting libraries, please shout here !!

I was using PHP4 these days, so this error was something which revisited after a long time. In PHP4 I new what it means and how to rectify.

The error indicates that PHP was unable to connect to the MySQL DB and it is basically an error on the PHP installation/ missing library file.

Generally, one need to check following things in order to troubleshoot the current situation.

Is it PHP5 on which this error happened and are its after you migrated to PHP5? If then, one small peiece of information for you. MySQL support is not enabled by default in PHP5. You can read http://in.php.net/manual/en/faq.databases.php#faq.databases.mysql.php5 for the reasons and how to troubleshoot.

Following are some other basic troubleshooting steps.

Windows System

1. Make sure in your PHP.ini file , the mysql extension is enabled. Look for a line containing ‘extension=php_mysql.dll’ and if there is a semicolon in front of this, its not enabled. So remove the semicolon to enable it.
2. Check for the extension directory path in php.ini – ‘extension_dir = “C:\Program Files\PHP5\ext”‘ . make sure the path is correct, and you have the extension files in it. For mysql extension, you will need php_mysql.dll .

With this much, if mysql is present, you should not be seeing the error message again

Linux System

Make sure PHP is compiled with mysql support. Check http://in.php.net/mysql on the installation instructions.

If you are using PHP5 , mysql is not enabled by default (This is where the problem starts). So if you have PHP already installed, consider removing it and recompiling from the source with mysql support.

There are easier methods to set up LAMP systems. Please check  my post about XAMPP too

eMail Header Injection – What it is? 

You have a web form, having some text fields and a submit button, the values are posted to a server sided page , which sends you the details submitted. Take a simple contact us form. If you are a newbie to this, you will not think beyond just capturing the post valaues and sending a mail. But.. do you know that people can send unsolicited emails using the same server sided script, without you getting to know it?

How they do mail header injection? 

Its easier to send mailing commands as POST values to your script. Your script will process these instructions and send spam mails to the recipients mentioned in it. You will not have an idea about the abuse of your script, unless you will see a heavy bandwidth usage or your server people blocking your account for sending spam mails.

How to Prevent eMail Header Injection ? 

Following are some common steps to prevent mail header injection.

1. Enable for posting from only your domain. You can check the referring domain from which the form is posted. You can disable form posts from unknown domains.

2. Cecking user agents : Most of the spam posting engines will have empty User-Agent Strings. So you can add this condition in your server sided code to block spammers.

3. Check for mail commands in POST values. For example,

$badStrings = array("Content-Type:",
"MIME-Version:",
"Content-Transfer-Encoding:",
"bcc:",
"cc:");

the above array contains some of the words you find in a spammers POST values. So you can block the POST, checking the presence of any of these words.

More techniques, if you know any, please feel free to share. Thank you