TCPFlow – When you just want to see what’s going on, now.

Use Wireshark, they said, it’s awesome, they said.

Sure, ok but what if I just want to see what’s going on?  Enter TCPFlow. No, not as full featured as Wireshark, but neither is my brain when I’m in a hurry.

What’s the benefit? Follow along:

  • Download TCPFlow – there’s a prepackaged copy here
  • Figure out which network-interface has the interesting traffic (en0, etc)
  • Follow one of these examples:
    • sudo /usr/local/bin/tcpflow -c -i en0 host 10.0.1.1 - Watches all traffic to 10.0.1.1
    • sudo /usr/local/bin/tcpflow -c -i en1 tcp port 80 - Watches all traffic on port 80

This is especially handy when troubleshooting smtp process, or directory server setup (before enabling ssl)

Learn more at: http://www.office.mvps.org/troubleshoot/tcpflow.html

SideTrash Lives again

For many years I’ve enjoyed SideTrash… but the way it’s posted only works on 10.6 and below.  I’ve posting it again in a way that works on 10.6+.

Why SideTrash?  Because it’s easier to drag a proxy icon to the trash in the dock, vs having to find it and delete it.

User Manual:

  1. Download from here SideTrash 1.2.dmg (2.4mb)
  2. Drag the SideTrash application to your Applications folder, etc
  3. Drag the SideTrash application to your Dock
  4. Take any file you’re looking at, and want to trash, and drag its proxy icon to SideTrash
  5. Close the file, knowing that wherever it was, it’s in the trash now.
  6. Enjoy!
  7. Repeat steps 4-6 as often as you like.

I didn’t write this, I’ve simply repackaged and signed the code written by Paolo Portaluri.

http://work.to.it/software/sidetrash/index-en.html

WordPress, ssh2, libssh and pecl – securely updating your WordPress plugins

I don’t want to run FTP on my webserver, sorry. WordPress can be convinced to update itself using SSH, but pecl install ssh2 is needed for it to work.

If you don’t want to fuss with pecl, there’s a plugin which can setup updates via ssh, but it involves configuration for each site in a multisite setup, and was more hassle than I wanted in my life. So it’s back to pecl, but I ran into an issue with precious little on the googles to help with this.

So, here’s the solution which worked for me…

apt-get install php-pear php5-dev
mkdir libssh2install
cd libssh2install
wget http://www.libssh2.org/download/libssh2-1.4.3.tar.gz
tar -zxvf libssh2-1.4.3.tar.gz
cd libssh2-1.4.3/
./configure
make
make install
pecl install "channel://pecl.php.net/ssh2-0.11.3"

Gave me a very welcome Build process completed successfully

Installing '/usr/lib/php5/20121212/ssh2.so'
install ok: channel://pecl.php.net/ssh2-0.11.3
configuration option "php_ini" is not set to php.ini location
You should add "extension=ssh2.so" to php.ini

Looks like it worked!

Now we need to edit the active php configuration for your install, I did this:

sudo echo /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/20-ssh2.ini > extension=ssh2.so
service apache2 restart

I got some of this information from this post by Henning Glatter-Götz, and he’s got the rest of the steps needed in WordPress are laid out  well.

So, here’s the hard parts of getting WordPress updating via ssh. Hope this helps you!