Tag Archives: Software

WordPress: Troubleshooting Contact Forms

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Down the rabbit holeI’m trying to get a contact form working on our WordPress site, and it is a little more complicated than I thought it might be.

The contact form plugin itself in WordPress. We’re using Contact Form 7. Documentation for Contact Form 7 says something to the effect “we’re sending upteen zillion eMails a day, and CF form “just works” for everybody.  Well, kinda, sorta. There are several other issues involved:

  • an MTA (mail transfer agent) which maybe (?)  has to be on the WordPress server
  • the php_mail() function which is part of PHP (the programming language for WordPress)
  • the wp_mail() function which may or may not call the php_mail() function
  • Restrictions on to and from addresses.

I wanted to just run everything through our Google Mail SMTP account, but that seems to add an additional layer.  So first I started with our blog site which is on another server, and tested whether the contact form worked there. It actually doesn’t,  that is, it appears to send mail correctly from the users’s perspective, but no email was received anywhere.

 

Per this note I checked to see if anything was listening on port 25, the usual SMTP port.

$ netstat -tanpl | grep :25
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 3030/master
tcp6 0 0 ::1:25 :::* LISTEN 3030/master

$ lsof -i :25
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
master 3030 root 12u IPv4 9667 0t0 TCP localhost:smtp (LISTEN)
master 3030 root 13u IPv6 9668 0t0 TCP ip6-localhost:smtp (LISTEN)

Looks promising.  it appears that both IP4 and IP6 are listening.

So, I created a basic PHP script to test at the server command line, and saved this as testphpmail.php. There are three parameters, the receiver’s address, the subject and the body of the message.

//This is a test of the basic PHP eMail function.

<?php
mail('joeblow@blow.com', "Test PHP Mail", "Test mail from PHP Mail");
?>

Run this script from the command line with the following command:

php -f testmail.php

This worked; I received the eMail. It shows that it comes from root.  At least  I knew that at least the fundamentals are in place on the server.

Checking the mail log,  at /var/log/mail.log I see the following:

$ cat/var/log/mail.log
May 20 14:28:17 li239-124 postfix/pickup[28709]: 11864F123: uid=0 from=<root>
May 20 14:28:17 li239-124 postfix/cleanup[28806]: 11864F123: message-id=<20160520142817.11864F123@localhost>
May 20 14:28:17 li239-124 postfix/qmgr[3039]: 11864F123: from=<root@localhost>, size=351, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 20 14:28:17 li239-124 postfix/smtp[28808]: 11864F123: to=<lkkg@myserver.org>,
relay=aspmx.l.google.com[173.194.204.27]:25, delay=0.21, delays=0.01/0.01/0.1/0.09, 
dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1463754497 e92si18328547qga.115 - gsmtp)

So this shows that the message was sent, using root@localhost as the sender’s address and my work eMail as the target.  And indeed, I received this email at work.

I checked the log file at /var/log/mail.log which presented various points of interest…including the fact that we are running the Postfix sendmail email server.  But there is also a status=bounced message for IP6.

$ cat /var/log/mail.log 
May 20 13:50:15 li239-124 postfix/pickup[13030]: 2973DF23B: uid=33 from=<www-data>
May 20 13:50:15 li239-124 postfix/cleanup[14078]: 2973DF23B: message-id=<49922f80371c574883b8b8d699f47d9b@blog.kidsgardening.org>
May 20 13:50:15 li239-124 postfix/qmgr[3039]: 2973DF23B: from=<www-data@localhost>, size=869, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 20 13:50:15 li239-124 postfix/smtp[14080]: 2973DF23B: to=<lkkg@myserver.org>, relay=aspmx.l.google.com[2607:f8b0:400d:c08::1a]:25, delay=0.41, delays=0.01/0.01/0.09/0.3, dsn=5.7.1, 
status=bounced (host aspmx.l.google.com[2607:f8b0:400d:c08::1a] said: 550-5.7.1 [2600:3c03::f03c:91ff:fe6e:916c] Our system has detected that this 550-5.7.1 message does not meet IPv6 sending guidelines regarding PTR records 550-5.7.1 and authentication. 
Please review 550-5.7.1 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=ipv6_authentication_error for more 550 5.7.1 information. a139si18154032qkc.140 - gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA command))
May 20 13:50:15 li239-124 postfix/cleanup[14078]: 8DAAAF23C: message-id=<20160520135015.8DAAAF23C@localhost>
May 20 13:50:15 li239-124 postfix/bounce[14081]: 2973DF23B: sender non-delivery notification: 8DAAAF23C
May 20 13:50:15 li239-124 postfix/qmgr[3039]: 8DAAAF23C: from=<>, size=3381, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 20 13:50:15 li239-124 postfix/qmgr[3039]: 2973DF23B: removed
May 20 13:50:15 li239-124 postfix/local[14082]: 8DAAAF23C: to=<www-data@localhost>, relay=local, delay=0.01, delays=0/0.01/0/0, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered to mailbox)
May 20 13:50:15 li239-124 postfix/qmgr[3039]: 8DAAAF23C: removed
root@li239-124:~# dpkg -S 'which sendmail'
dpkg-query: no path found matching pattern *which sendmail*.
root@li239-124:~# netstat -tanpl | grep:25
grep:25: command not found
root@li239-124:~# netstat -tanpl | grep :25
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 3030/master
tcp6 0 0 ::1:25 :::* LISTEN 3030/master

Just to be sure, I ran the PHP script again having it send to my home email address which is outside my work domain.  This bounced and I didn’t receive it at the home address.  Now,  in theory, this might not be a bad thing, since all of the Contact Form 7  messages from the blog page should be sent to an address within the same domain, like customerservice@myserver.com.

So far, then we’ve established:

  • PostFix is installed on the blog’s server.
  • Contact Form 7 shows that it is sending message, but the messages are bouncing.  (Hmm…I wonder what I’ve been missing all those times? )

This is so typical of IT. You think you’re troubleshooting an issue on one server, and upon investigating the same issue on another server that you think is working…you find that it isn’t and down the rabbit hole you go!

FileMaker 15

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filemaker

FileMaker has updated to version 15 for all platforms. This version includes a ton of bug fixes, heightened security, and some internal changes, as opposed to visual changes. In fact it almost looks and acts the same as version 14.

There is a fair amount of grousing going on in the FileMaker forums about the paucity of new features and (yet another) increase in the effective price. I’m afraid that FileMaker is pricing themselves completely out of the low-end market, although a single copy can be had for education or nonprofits for $197 on Amazon. (Regular price $329).  This is a perfectly respectable deal, and you might want to consider at least one copy for end-user database needs especially if you use Macs, or loath Microsoft Access. FileMaker is my database of choice for front-ends for mySQL (via ODBC), managing eMail lists, and creating tables and inspecting data of all kinds.

FileMaker comes with some pre-built database applications called “Starter Solutions”. Some of these  have been updated for version 15.  I did my expense reporting for a recent trip in the Expense solution, and it makes an attractive listing sorted by categories of all your trip expenses.  Here’s the data entry screen.

Screenshot_051716_035903_PM

Here’s the report:

Expense Report

The application can be hosted on FileMaker server and accessed in a web browser, or run within a standalone copy of FileMaker on a Mac or PC, or run on an iPhone or iPad using the free FileMaker Go app.

There is provision for storing an image of each receipt.  If you run the application on an iPad, you can snap a picture of a paper receipt, or enter a bar-code.  Pretty slick!

 

WordPress: Fix the File Upload Size Limit

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On our WordPress site we want to allow the site manager the ability to upload PDF files which can then be downloaded by our blog viewers. While working out this process we ran into a problem with the file size; any file larger than 2 megabytes was not allowed to be uploaded to the site.

Rather than having this setting located somewhere within WordPress, it turns out that the setting is set by the PHP installation.  (PHP is the language that WordPress is written in, and WordPress the application is written as a series of PHP files).

As I was working through this issue, the first embarrassment was that I couldn’t even find the WordPress installation on my Linux server. Usually WordPress is supposed to be installed somewhere relatively transparent, like the /var/html/wordpress folder. Instead mine was buried under  /srv/www/li999-999.members.linode.com/public_html; somehow related to my virtual host from Linode

As my plumber says, when looking at the latest plumbing problem in our basement, “I wonder why they did that?”  Whatever. The way I finally found this out was to search for the one file that is in every WordPress site; wp-config.php.  I did this by firing up the FileZilla FTP program, and doing a search for remote files.

SearchRemoe

Having found the root directory of my WP installation,  I now needed to find the location of the PHP configuration file. I used a similar search in FileZilla and came up with two php.ini files.  Which was the “real” one?

Actually, I didn’t need to do that. Instead, I needed to get to have a script that calls the phpinfo() function which displays a nice list of all the php configuration parameters. Placed in the root directory of my web server, and then called from a web browser, this script displays all of the inner workings of the php configuration of my site.  Here’s the script:

<?php
// Show all information, defaults to INFO_ALL
phpinfo();

?>

This script is saved as GetPHPInfo.php and copied back to the root directory of the web server.

http://mywebsite/GetPHPInfo.php

Call this script in the web browser and it produces  the following:

PHP1

The above is just the tip of the iceberg. Scrolling waaaay down, I find the following parameter in the “core” section of the page:

php2

That is the size restriction, and it is this parameter that I need to change.  I’m thinking that 12 megs should be plenty.  Looking back up top in the 6th line, I see the “Loaded Configuration File” is located at:  /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini  This is the file I’m going to change. So, its back to FileZilla to find it, download it and edit it in Notepad++

PHPini

I downloaded the wp-config.php file to my local machine using FileZilla.  Then I edited the file using Notepad++. to change the  2M to 12M.  Then I uploaded the file via FileZilla back to the web server.

At this point I needed to reboot the web server, Apache2. Depending on the your installation, there are a couple ways to do this at the command line:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Or,  in the case of the lazy systems administrator, I just rebooted the whole server. This takes less than two minutes.

The result is now we can upload files that are a maximum of 12 megabytes in size.

I get to do this on another WordPress server too.  Oh joy!

Slack for Non-Profits – EMail is Obsolete!

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Back in February I wrote about using Slack for our non-profit organization.  I’ve since introduced this to another organization that I’m a board member for, and it appears to have really taken off for this other group. One thing I hadn’t mentioned last time was the Slack for Non-Profits program, which provides all of the benefits of a paid Slack account to a qualifying non-profit for free. These include:

  • A fully searchable archive with unlimited messages
  • Unlimited external integrations
  • Simple usage statistics
  • Custom message retention policies
  • Guest access
  • Premium support
The first point I should emphasize is that even if you don’t qualify for the non-profit program, Slack is still highly useful. In particular, we were looking for the ability to invite users to our Slack board, without having those users be able to see the entire list of channels. For example,  here is our channel list.

You’ll note that this full list includes the standard default channels, “general”, and “random”.  All of the other channels are related either to committees, or for planning of upcoming events.  The committees include:

  • board
  • fundraising
  • publicity
The planning channels include
  • 2015_fall_concert
  • 50th_anniversary 
  • auditions_2015fall 
You may have gathered that our group is a music group.  We’re actually a semi-professional choral group of 36 acapella singers that sing five centuries of choral music.  
The calendar channel is a special channel. This is an integration which displays calendar events that are entered into our organization’s Google Calendar. You’ll note that the non-profit plan includes “unlimited integrations”. (The free plans include 10 integrations). Integrations are a whole separate discussion, but briefly, they allow events and information from other applications to appear (be copied to) a Slack channel and vice-versa. I’ve used this especially for integrating Trello project management boards with Slack channels. So, for example, I may have a Trello board for a particular grant application, and have additions and changes in the Trello board appear within the fundraising channel. 
Ok.  Back to the other enhancements. An advantage of the non-profit plan is that we’ll be able to create a channel for, say the Concert Committee, and invite all the members of that committee to the channel. Those members can be restricted so that they can’t see the board channel, or indeed any other committees that they aren’t a member of. This is great for us…as we’ll probably end up having channels for each committee, as well as an AllMembers channel for everyone who sings with us.  
The other major advantage of non-profit status is that you can use the enhancements for no cost. I was interested to see that the Slack crew said if we had an actual paid account, we’d be spending US$640.00 per year, and that is just for our current subset of our full membership, (basically the board of directors). By the time we add our committee channels and the rest of our members, we’ll be getting the equivalent of at least double that amount. Not bad for a few minutes of filling out the application.  
What are you waiting for?  Apply for a Non-Profit Slack account now.  You’ll need a 501c(3) letter, testifying that you are granted non-profit status.

And I’d love to hear how you are using Slack in your non-profit; send a note or leave comments. 

FileZilla

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I have taken over our webmaster’s job, following the departure of that esteemed and highly valued person a week or so ago. We are going to miss him in ways that we haven’t even figured out yet.

I’m scrambling to find out everything that the webmaster does…and finding that his tool set was basic in the extreme; roughly a text editor and and the superb open-source FTP program called FileZilla. With these two tools, he maintained two major web sites, and several minor mini-sites, built on-demand web pages for special projects, ran our DNS, managed our open-source survey system called LimeSurvey, did our analytics and search-engine-optimization (SEO), slung PHP code like a master, and managed a series of third-party advertising tiles and several mailing lists.  Whew!  

A Database for Grant Research

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I put together a grants database screen (click to view full size) to consolidate information for funding sources, and to track dates and interactions.

It is definitely an evolving project, but contains the basic information need to contact the funder, the deadline dates involved, the funder’s areas of interest, and the typical range of a grant award.

So far, I’ve been concentrating on foundation funding. Many foundations typically ask for a letter of interest before you put together a full proposal. So, I’ve included multiple date fields, a deadline for a letter of interest, a deadline for a full proposal, and a date when they announce their award.

Originally I thought that this database would be mostly for research, but after working with the online grants database, Grantstation, I think I will reserve this database for funders that I really expect to submit to. Some ideas for future enhancements include:

  • Links to standard “boilerplate” paragraphs that are used in an application. 
  • Links to edit the proposal or letter directly in Word. 
  • Links to the PDFs of the proposal. 
  • Reports that create a grants calendar. 
Before anyone comments that “you should really use X software” for this purpose, I just want to say that I’ve used several in the past, including DonorPerfect and Blackbaud, and evaluated many others. Right now, I’m in the process of rethinking my entire workflow automation from the ground up, and this very lightweight approach is just what I’m looking for. Plus its in FileMaker, so I can run it on my Windows machines at work, or my Macs at home.     

Alabama Eye Bank runs on FileMaker Pro.

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Over at  Tech for Home Healtcare,  I’ve described how the Alabama Eye Bank uses FileMaker Pro to manage the process of receiving donated corneas thorough finding a recipient and scheduling the surgery. It is an amazing application that shows the cross-platform versatility of FileMaker, hosted on Windows servers, and deployed to Mac workstations, iPads, and iPhones.  

FreeNAS: Automate Drive Mappings for Windows Users

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This is the third in a series about FreeNAS, the free network attached storage application which allows you to create an inexpensive but highly capable network file server for backups, iTunes, and general file sharing. Our application is a server for student data. We want to give each student a secure folder in which to store files that they create and use when working in our student computer labs.  The two previous postings are:

Creating a FreeNAS server for student data

Adding students and creating folders 

Note that the first link picks up at the point that the FreeNAS server software has been installed on to server hardware with a minimal configuration. The FreeNAS web site has links to several tutorials as well as the official setup guide.

By the way, FreeNAS installs really nicely within a virtual machine so you can easily test it out. I’ve got it running in Parallels on my MacBook, with software RAID 5 providing redundant disk storage.

Mapping a drive to a student folder

Once I set up the student’s folder and account on the FreeNAS server, I wanted to be able to give them the opportunity to access it from any workstation in our student lab.  The cleanest way I could think of was to create an icon on the desktop which runs a script. The script does the following:
1. Asks for the student login name
2. Asks for the student’s password
3. Maps the H: drive to the student’s folder on the FreeNAS server.

Student folders are named exactly the same as the student login, and they all appear under a shared folder called “StudentData”.  The full path is /mnt/StudentData/.  So, when student Myron Kapoodle logs in with his user name mkapoodle, the script takes him to: 

/mnt/StudentData/mkapoodle

Thus, when the student accesses drive H:, they find themselves in their own folder. They can’t select a folder “above” their own, and they can’t access anyone else’s folder, even if they can see it when browsing around the network neighborhood.

The Script

' VBScript to map a network drive.
' Heavily borrowed from ....
' Guy Thomas http://computerperformance.co.uk/
' Larry Keyes www.techfornonprofits.com
' ------------------------------------------------------'
Option Explicit
Dim strDriveLetter, strRemotePath, strUser, strPassword
Dim objNetwork, objShell, objFSO
Dim CheckDrive, AlreadyConnected, intDrive
strUser=""
strPassword=""

' This section gets the name and password
strUser=InputBox("Enter your User Name")
strPassword=InputBox("Enter your Password")

' The section sets the variables.
strDriveLetter = "H:"
strRemotePath = "\\freenas\StudentData\" & strUser

' This sections creates two objects:
' objShell and objNetwork and counts the drives
Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objNetwork = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Network")
Set objFSO = WScript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set CheckDrive = objNetwork.EnumNetworkDrives()

If objFSO.DriveExists(strDriveLetter) Then
objShell.Popup "The H: Drive is already mapped"
objNetwork.RemoveNetworkDrive strDriveLetter
strRemotePath = "\\freenas\StudentData\" & strUser
objNetwork.MapNetworkDrive strDriveLetter, strRemotePath , false, strUser, strPassword
Else
strRemotePath = "\\freenas\StudentData\" & strUser
objNetwork.MapNetworkDrive strDriveLetter, strRemotePath , false, strUser, strPassword
End if

'Section which actually (re)names the Mapped Drive to eliminate naming problem.
Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
objShell.NameSpace(strDriveLetter & "\").Self.Name = strUser
Wscript.Echo "Check : "& strDriveLetter & " for " & strUser
WScript.Quit

There is some extra stuff in there that attempts to fix an issue that appeared in Windows 7, where if the drive mapping is reused, it shows up with the name of the previous user.

Our student workstations have a single “student” local account.  Every student logs in to that account when they use the workstation. There are no individual user profiles. In some cases I have the student account log in automatically, and I’ll probably do this on all machines that use the FreeNAS network so that a student doesn’t have to log in twice…once to the desktop and once with their own user name and password on the FreeNAS server.

This script should be installed on each Windows workstation, with a desktop icon to appear on the desktop of the student account.

Two other observations and questions:

1. Obviously you can simply map a drive from the command line using Start->Run->CMD, and then at the prompt  type MAP H: /freeNAS/StudentData/mkapoodle.

2. I searched all over for a more elegant way to have a screen that came up that would ask for the name and password and then make the call to create the drive mapping. First I looked at C#, then, because Visual Basic has a “shell” command, I switched to VB. However that required a full-blown Windows installation of the .exe file, as well as a batch file which was called by the VB program. I finally decided I could live with two windows popping up; one asking for the name and another for the password.

Vista to Windows 7 upgrade on Mac Parallels

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Earlier, I did a couple of fresh installations of Windows 7 and found it agreeable, so now I’m upgrading the Vista VM running on my iMac with Parallels 4.0. This has presented various points of interest .

1. You can do an in-place upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, but not from Windows XP.

2. I had to increase the size of the Parallels Vista VM disk from 30 gigs to 48 gigs to accommodate the installation files for Windows 7. You do this in Parallels through the Parallels Image Tool which expands the disk partition size. Before doing this is will merge any snapshots that you’ve taken. I had only a single snapshot that I had created when first installing Parallels a year ago. Rather than allow this merge, which would have taken several hours, I exited out of the program, deleted the snapshot through the snapshot manager, then reentered the Image Tool and performed the expansion in a about 30 seconds.

3. I increased the available RAM from 1 gig to 2 gigs, at least for the installation, since it was a stated requirement to have more than 1 gig. I may crank it back to 1 afterwards.

4. Among the steps during an upgrade, there is “Gathering files, settings and programs” The count of these was 414,061. That is not a misprint. Amazing, after less than a year of running this particular Vista workstation how much crap you accumulate. I’m also wondering at how they calculate the percentage in the upgrade status screen (above) which doesn’t seem to correspond with the numbers.

My guess is one reason XP isn’t supported for an upgrade is that XP still runs nicely on smaller, older machines, and these are probably not good candidates for a Windows 7 upgrade… notwithstanding the fact that Win7 is supposed to have a smaller footprint both in disk space and memory requirements than Vista. Accordingly, any machine that can run Vista should be able to accommodate Windows 7.

Rosetta Stone Language Learning Software

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You’ve probably seen the silly ads in those upscale magazines… “she was an Italian supermodel, he was a farm boy from Omaha”… or something similar. Very weird ad campaign, perhaps, but the consensus among many foreign language educators, and teachers of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) is that Rosetta Stone is a powerful program for teaching a second (third, fourth… ) language.

One of my clients, a provider of literacy and workforce development education has been happily using the standalone version of Rosetta Stone for some years. A couple years ago they somehow got talked into buying a network version which requires installation on a network server, and some hours of configuration and installation. This was probably not a good choice for them; they don’t really have the wherewithal or the need for this. After several weeks of phone calls and eMails attempting to exchange the licenses for single-user copies, we gave up and are now attempting to install the network version. (To be fair, their exchange policy states that there is a 180 day period after purchase in which to return their products…and we’re actually attempting this project 18 months or more after they purchased the program).

Rosetta Stone is available in several different configurations, including an online subscription which can be used via a web browser. Either this or single user copies would have been ideal. Instead, what they were sold appears to be the Rosetta Stone Enterprise version which includes a management server which tracks student progress.

One ironic twist is that this network edition includes the open source MySQL database and the Apache web server. Yet the Rosetta Stone server requires a Windows machine to run. So, instead of the server running under Linux, you have to have some kind of Windows box to host the server applications. The server installer then installs MySQL and Apache for Windows running as services and also installs Ruby. The server requires a static IP.

This was not something we wanted on our organization administration file server which is a a Windows 2003 Server. Hence the Dell T105 mentioned previously, running Windows XP.

Once the server applications are installed, you install the languages. In our case we have three levels of English, each on a its own CD. There is an installation program which prompts for the language CDs, and then gives you the option to activate them.

Activation is rather like activating Windows over the internet. For each language/level you’ve purchased, you can have one student running the program at a time. The license keys are similar to windows…. four groups of six letters and numbers. If you have already activated a language license elsewhere, then activation will fail…you have to go back to the computer on which you originally performed the activation, and “remove a language”. How this would be resolved if a hard drive had crashed or the computer was otherwise unavailable, I’m not sure.

The Rosetta Stone Manager is the management interface that allows managers to create user accounts for Rosetta Stone. This program is installed separatly from the server and is available in a Windows or a Mac version. The Mac version appeared to work OK, even on Snow Leopard.

Before going further, I called Rosetta Stone Tech support to inquire about updates. I figured that since the software was 2 years old, they probably had updated it within that time and there were no obvious links in the screens to obtain updates. Oh, yes… they would send new disks, and I need to do a complete reinstall. (Sigh), another three hours out the window. As Jerry Pournelle says….”we do these things so you don’t have to”.

After preparing the server. and adding myself as a user, I then attempted to install the workstation version of the software onto my Vista machine. This runs an Installshield installation. It worked great on an XP box. I was able to log in to the account that I set up in the Rosetta Stone server, and run the program. Seemed to work fine in a Vista session on my Mac with Parallels.

There is also a native Mac installer; this seemed unusual as I don’t recall ANY Mac software, no matter how complex, which actually requires an installation process on the Mac other than copying the application file to the Apps folder. This installer, “powered by Vise X” so far seems to be doing a search of all my hard drives. Once it does the search however, it then installs over 2000 files (!) including a Flash Player and a ton of JPG and Gif graphics files. Still, the application came up fine.

So, we’ve now got Rosetta Stone running on a Mac machine, a Vista virtual machine within Parallels on the Mac, and on an XP machine. I’m feeling confident enough to bring the server in tomorrow for a trial run.