*This tutorial assumes that you already have Smoothwall Express installed on your hardware of choice.

With BT Infinity becoming evermore available we decided to setup and test smoothwall as our Firewall of choice. After quite a bit of head scratching we were able to get things up and running.

Once you have Smoothwall up and running access the web interface (https and port 441 – http://x.x.x.x:441) and navigate to Network > Interfaces:

Here, simply select the PPPoE as the ‘Connection method:” and save. Now navigate to Network > ppp:

Here we enter a Profile name, BT username and password and the authentication method. Above is an example of the settings we used for our BT Infinity test line.

Now navigate to Control > Home and click connect. If everything has been entered correctly you should have a Firewall protected BT Infinity line. Enjoy.

Few things to note:

• Cat 5 from white modem to smoothwall red interface
• Cat 5 from green interface into your switch or machine
• Firewall > Outgoing > Make sure 80, 443 etc. are open so you can access the outside world from behind the Firewall.

Very simple but useful command to find files over e.g. 1000kb and output to a log file:

find ./ -type f -size +1000k >> size.log

Either you have just installed WordPress or have moved your website to a new server/domain and you are now only able to see the homepage of you site. When clicking on a link on the nav you get a 404 error.

Don’t worry the fix will be simple. From previous experience it will be one of the following:

1. .htaccess – this hasn’t copied over to your new directory. Check for the .htaccess file just inside your parent directory and check its contents. If missing recover from your previous directory.

2. Permissions – when setting up a new site the director permissions are normally set quite low. Change them to 755 (WordPress standard)

chown -R 755 webdir

3. Ownership – again check the ownership of the directory and update recursively if necessary:

ls -lh webdir

chown -R user.group webdir

4. Hardcoded urls – depending on how your website has been coded it may contain hardcoded urls in the database. Run a find/replace on your sql dump before importing into its new home. Notepad++ is the lazy-mans way or else run from commandline.

Following on from our previous post (https://www.linuxtutorial.co.uk/cpanel-mysql-backup-script/) there is another script for the full backup of CPanel web directories.

The original post is taken from http://r00t3r.com/cpanel-full-backup-cron-script-for-automated-backups/ which contains a link to download the PHP files.

The main file to worry about is the config.php which contains a cpanel section:

// CPANEL ACCOUNT TO BACKUP
define( 'CPANEL_SERVER_ADDRESS',		'abc.def.ghj.mnp' );	// IP address or domain name for the server with the cPanel account
define( 'CPANEL_PORT_NUM',				'2083' );	// The port number for the cPanel. If you have problems, try 2082
define( 'CPANEL_ADMIN_USERNAME',		'admin-username' );	// the admin username for your cPanel account
define( 'CPANEL_ADMIN_PASSWORD',		'veryStrongPassword' ); // the admin password for your cPanel account

and the FTP server section:

define( 'FTP_SERVER_ADDRESS',			'npq.rst.uvw.xyz' );     // IP address or URL of the FTP server
define( 'FTP_SERVER_PORT',			'21' );			 // FTP(S) Port. Default is 21.
define( 'FTP_USERNAME',				'ftp-username' );	 // FTP Username
define( 'FTP_PASSWORD',				'ftp-password' );	 // FTP Password
define( 'FTP_PATH_TO_COPY',			'/ftp/path/to/copy/' );	 // FTP Path (where do you want to copy the files?)

Simply enter in your CPanel and FTP server account details to this PHP script.

Once in place setup the cron job to run on a regular basis e.g.

1 1 * * * php -q /home/user/path_to_phpscript/cpanelbackup.php

Simple PHP MySQL backup script for CPanel. Create a php file and insert the following code:

<?
$datestamp = date("Y-m-d");// Current date to append to filename of backup file in format of YYYY-MM-DD

/* CONFIGURE THE FOLLOWING THREE VARIABLES TO MATCH YOUR SETUP */
$dbuser = "username";// Database username
$dbpwd = "password";// Database password
$dbname = "database";// Database name. Use --all-databases if you have more than one
$filename= "backup-$datestamp.sql.gz";// The name (and optionally path) of the dump file

$command = "mysqldump -u $dbuser --password=$dbpwd $dbname | gzip > $filename";
$result = passthru($command);

/* CONFIGURE THE FOLLOWING FOUR VARIABLES TO MATCH YOUR FTP SETUP */
$ftp_server = "hostname";// Shouldn't have any trailing slashes and shouldn't be prefixed with ftp://
$ftp_port = "21";// FTP port - blank defaults to port 21
$ftp_username = "username";// FTP account username
$ftp_password = "password";// FTP account password - blank for anonymous

// set up basic connection
$ftp_conn = ftp_connect($ftp_server);

// Turn PASV mode on or off
ftp_pasv($ftp_conn, false);

// login with username and password
$login_result = ftp_login($ftp_conn, $ftp_username, $ftp_password);

// check connection
if ((!$ftp_conn) || (!$login_result))
{
echo "FTP connection has failed.";
echo "Attempted to connect to $ftp_server for user $ftp_username";
exit;
}
else
{
echo "Connected to $ftp_server, for user $ftp_username";
}

// upload the file
$upload = ftp_put($ftp_conn, $filename, $filename, FTP_BINARY);

// check upload status
if (!$upload)
{
echo "FTP upload has failed.";
}
else
{
echo "Uploaded $filename to $ftp_server.";
}

// close the FTP stream
ftp_close($ftp_conn);

unlink($filename);   //delete the backup file from the server
?>

Now add a cron job to trigger the backup script when required:

1 1 * * * php -q /home/user/path_to_phpscript/sqlbackup.php

The above code will trigger the backup to run at 1:01 a every day of the year.

Use a cron calculator to sepcify the time and days you would like your cron to run: http://www.csgnetwork.com/crongen.html