Author: Yazeed

A short while back, I was handed a repository with code written in Laravel, incomplete, and somewhat sketchy. with the purpose of taking a look at the code and deciding whether i would take it or not.

To give you the lowdown FIRST, while first researching Laravel, I started by investigating the limitations, my first google search sent me in the direction of a blog post by Beau Beauchamp, a developer who seems familiar with the framework.

I obviously didn’t take his word for it, I don’t really know who he is, so i gave myself a 2 day intensive Laravel course, unfortunately he was somewhat right.

The following two paragraphs are from his blog post, they don’t tell you much, but are better explained as I go

Laravel prides itself as the framework for “artisans”. The impression is that Laravel is the framework for people who don’t really know how to code and don’t want to learn. I get it.

Laravel is not PHP, per se, it uses an “expressive” syntax or what has been coined as “syntactic sugar” to hide things from you that it thinks “artisans” don’t need to worry about.

Having no experience with Laravel, and plenty of experience in PHP, the 2 day course i mentioned earlier left me with the following impressions, I was Impressed by how massive it is (Implementing plenty of features with very few lines), impressed by how simple and easy it is (Truly made for people who don’t want to learn programming). and thinking that this is basically a great framework for a simple straight forward website, but once you are looking to give the website more edge, a competitive advantage, or creating complex functionality, the framework is pretty restrictive and not so scalable.

yes, caching can help with the scalability part, but the degree caching helps with depends on the nature of the website, and for this particular purpose, it is not a perfect solution.

So should we throw the existing code away ?

My answer is NO, if i do end up taking this job, I plan to launch with the Laravel code, then extend the software with good old plain old PHP, with the database acting as the API between the new system and the old system, this way, the website owner can have a functional website where he can promote and advertise, and dip his toes in the water while a different system slowly takes this system’s place as it gets developed.

After updating the existing code from Laravel 7 to Laravel 9 (Overhead), running a security audit for the code, A varnish or nginx proxy should sit in the middle, and new code should run transparently through the proxy, when that happens, I am not even restricted to the same virtual machine running Laravel, I can have 2 virtual machines running different tools acting as one website, transparently, without the user ever knowing.

The front end with react

The other issue I have with this project is with react and react-native, which are the front ends of both web and mobile applications.

React is a very cool framework, but there is quite a bit of controversy around it and around Ajax in general when it comes to Search Engine optimization (SEO), in a statement by google ten years ago, googlebot is now able to read a website the same way a web browser does, and I have seen that they do see it that way from ten years ago when they were providing tools telling people what pages on their websites were having horizontal scroll bars, but regardless of that statement, the fact that most websites that appear in my search results are not Ajax, and that HTML and CSS still run most of the popular websites does raise some concerns, entering into a very competitive market dictates that every inch of a competitive advantage is vital to our success.

So, first let me get the advantages and disadvantages of Laravel out of the way, then get into the technicalities and how the new system should co-exist with Laravel and react.

Pros

• Laravel is a very mature framework, but very opinionated, opinionated means the designers of the framework expect you to create your website in one specific way, and as long as you are within those lines, you can make things work, what mature and popular means is that when you don’t see those lines, someone online has probably mentioned how to do it with Laravel.
• Laravel is not the greatest in backwards compatibility, so when a new release comes out, it is not just PHP that you need to worry about, it is also Laravel, and from people’s experiences online, things tend to either break or become buggy when a major release of Laravel is out
• Laravel is heavy, very heavy, and to deal with that, the developers have come up with workarounds, mainly caching, which lends itself to certain websites more than others, sometimes caching can have so little benefit, and sometimes it is a magic recipe for super snappy
• Laravel is based on symphony, and works great with react, but even though google has claimed that their spider treats

Here is my problem, I have a website, and in a directory in that website, I have a wordpress installation, and that installation opens correctly, loads all the images, css, js and any other files for a proper experience, only problem is, when you put this behind a varnish reverse proxy, and an nginx reverse proxy for SSL (https), the website design (theme) does not load, you only see the actual html page that was loaded, but all other elements are never fetched from the server, i actually sniffed the data and found that css, javascript, and images are never even requested !

So the short of this story, if you are having problems with page loading without the theme or design, and you have a similar setup, odds are the problem is with wordpress settings not with nginx or with varnish !

So a closer look at the page source reveals that the page was loaded with https, but the links to all the page resources are in HTTP ! why is that ? simple

when you open the website in SSL, your browser creates a secure connection with nginx (termination), nginx requests the page from varnish, which relays the page again to the server.

As far as the web server serving wordpress is concerned, this request came in http, not https ! so all the page resources should be in http right ? yes, this is what is happening, but what is the solution

I tried a few solutions, for example, i changed the wordpress address and site address to httpS, but wordpress is smart enough to use whatever protocol the user accessed and use it for all resources !

there are many solutions programmatically, which is something i avoid because i update wordpress, and don’t want to fix it every time i upgrade, so whatever solution i need has got to be in the only file that is never modified when upgrading wordpress, the config file

wordpress knows it is on SSL from the following two entries in the environment, the entries $_SERVER[‘HTTPS’] and $_SERVER[‘SERVER_PORT’], the proxy sends a hint that the user used https with the variable $_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO’] in the request header, hence, adding the following code snippet somewhere in the beginning of the config file should deceive wordpress into thinking it has been accessed over https !

if($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'] == 'https'){
   $_SERVER['HTTPS'] = 'on';
   $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] = 443;
 }

Hope this all works okay for you, if not please let me know in the comments and i would be more than glad to help

My Seagate ST3000DM001 failed me, it was no longer detected by the BIOS, when the PC starts, you can feel the disk spinning, and the head moving in the usual way, but after spending a minute waiting for it to be detected on the post screen, the computer simply ignores it (Does not detect it) and boots without it. meaning the operating system does not detect it !

Before i blame Seagate (I prefer western digital in general), this drives is more than 5 years old, was only used for storage, and never ran any software, but still, more than 5 years old.

2- Diagnosis

the most likely cause seems to be the PCB board as the BIOS does not detect the disk altogether, nonetheless, I have had excellent results with the freezer trick before (Even though the freezer trick is not something that is suitable for this type of malfunction, the freezer helps with mechanical issues often denoted by unhealthy sounds coming from the drive). so I froze it (Within a bag to avoid condensation), and tried it a day later, but absolutely nothing was different, no surprise there.

I also, for no reason whatsoever, removed the LID and took a look inside, no idea what i was expecting to find, but i did anyways, everything looks normal inside, and hopefully no significant dust went in there.

So i decided it was most likely the board, considered this my diagnosis, and will now act accordingly

3- Work

3.1 – Find a donor board

Before looking online for a board, I took a look at the drives I had at home, turned out I do not have two of the same drive, but i do have a 2TB ST2000DM001 which had the exact board (100687658 Rev: C) ! obviously, the BIOS on the board is different between the two boards, so that has to be flipped from one board to the other (Basic soldering skills required), but otherwise, the boards are identical between the 2TB and the 3TB, I might end up losing both in this operation, but getting the data out is certainly worth the try

3.2 – Copy the data from the donor 2TB drive to a third drive (western digital 2TB drive)

To begin with, I started by finding a similarly sized hard drive to copy the data that resides on the donor disks before i take its board out, luckily, I found a western digital green drive of identical size and sector size, namely a (Western Digital Green WD20EARX), this third disk is to make sure i don’t lose any data from the 2TB donor drive, so here is how it is done

After connecting both disks to a Linux PC, I identified which disk is which using the fdisk command

fdisk -l

Now that i know which one is the source and which the destination, I started the process of copying the data from the donor (2TB), to third disk (The western digital).

by moving the data on the 2TB drive (The healthy one) to a similarly sized drive , this copy procedure is the simplest task, with both connected to a Linux machine I used my favorite cloning tool (Nop, not DD, I switched to PV the moment i first tried it).

pv < /dev/sdd > /dev/sdf

Now, All i can do is wait for 4:30 hours (According to PV), then come back, take the drives out, and start the surgery. it is copying at 115MB/s probably because the WD is a green drive that uses SMR recording.

Now that it is done copying, I took out the boards (Few screws), de-soldered the bios chip as you can see in the video, and soldered the one from the 3TB board onto the donor board and the one from the 2TB board onto the presumably malfunctioning board

the disk BIOS chip is the one branded winbond and has 8 pins (usually the only chip with 8 pins).

out of curiosity, I connected the 2TB drive (Now With the bad board after the swap), and it worked ! this is defiantly bad news, the problem was not the board after all ! connecting the 3TB disk yielded the same old problem exactly !

Who said you can’t mix and match between Laravel and code Igniter. well, you will face some issues, but they are not that hard to resolve.

It all starts with a cool package called EFTEC/BladeOne, which is simply blade without laravel !

to install it, you go to your CI application folder, and run the command

composer require EFTEC/BladeOne 

At this stage, we have Blade up and running, to use it, create a file under core for example, and let’s say we will call the controler /core/bladeController.php

NOTE: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

It is a rather old PC, 4th Gen intel at best, I have this motherboard with an Intel Xeon XPU, and 64GB of ram, so it is worth a try, I will start by ordering this TPM module from Amazon (here)

Once i receive it, I will come back and explain the whole experience, and if this works out of the box with windows 11, or if i need to fiddle with anything

I used to think screen protectors were applied in three steps, peel, stick, peel the other side, Not this one though !

NOTE: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

This is one different screen protector that comes with it’s own UV lamp ! it is the MOWEI (evatmaster) ! but is it worth all the hassle ? (See it on Amazon)

The claim is that it is a 9/10 on the hardness scale (Mohs scale), which is obviously hard to believe ! actually, I am very darn sure it is not, that is literally 1 step below diamond, so we all know the claim is not true, but it probably is scratch proof to a good extent. (Some guy tested the hardness, turned out to start scratching at 6, and get heavily scratched at 7, which is not bad, but again, nowhere near 9, (example: sapphire, the material the iPhone glass is made of is only theoretically a 9, but the impurities put it at around 8)

Okay, So let me start with installing it ! it comes with 3 Videos on how to install, how to remove bubbles, and how to remove the protector.

Let me give you the lowdown first, Up to now the experience is perfect, no lift with any of the covers I have, fingerprint sensor works perfectly, and cameras are very clear, also before curing with the UV lamp, you can drive the bubbles out easily, spills from the glue are easy to remove by hand, and up to now, the phone cover does not cause any lift, but i cured it far longer than the 2 minutes in the instructions.

If the excess glue is not going into dangouris places (your USB port or speakers, cure first, and then the glue comes out easly)

If you are like me, running only your own projects on a server, you might want to skip authentication

the changes I generally make to the file /etc/redis/redis.conf are

1- At the very beginning, limit the RAM redis can use with the line

maxmemory 2gb

2- Change the supervisor to systemd by modifying the line

supervised no

to

supervised systemd

Now, to test the new config, from the command line, run the following commands

systemctl restart redis-server
redis-cli
ping
config get maxmemory
quit

You have just configured redis and tested your new settings.

The reason I am enabling this in my virtual machine is to develop with android studio under windows or Linux in a dedicated development machine (Let us call it an android development virtual machine), you will need to enable nested virtualization for the virtual android phone that comes with Android studio, there are many occasions where you need nested virtualization, so let us see what we need to do.

1- Check if our system allows nested virtualization with the following line

cat /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/nested 

If this returns a Y or a 1, then we are good to go to the next step, if not, then execute the following to enable the feature on the host system

echo 'options kvm_intel nested=1' >> /etc/modprobe.d/qemu-system-x86.conf 

Now, with that out of the way, we can move to the next step

2- Enable nested virtualization in the config of the virtual machine, either with virsh edit or edit the file manually and reload it, whatever you are used to doing should work

virsh edit androiddev

Now, specify either host-model OR host-passthrough, host model is more compatible when moving the virtual machine to a new CPU, while host-passthrough will deliver absolutly all CPU features to the guest os, but is very unfriendly to moving the machine to a different KVM host

<cpu mode='host-model'> 

The original firmware based on debian did come with a DLNA server, in this post, I am only dealing with openWRT (You need to change the firmware due to a serious security issue on the NAS drive as shown here)

In openWRT, i recommend you install libffmpeg-full before miniDLNA, since miniDLNA will install libffmpeg-mini which will conflict

opkg update
opkg install libffmpeg-full
opkg install minidlna luci-app-minidlna

Once the above are done, you can setup your DLNA server from the web interface of openWRT

I would recommend that the database and log files be on the data partition to save space, something you can manually set from within the web interface

to rebuild that database (re-index the files), you will need to stop miniDLNA, run the update and then start the server again

service minidlna stop
minidlnad -R
service minidlna start

After an apt-get upgrade, phpmyadmin stopped working, I would see a blank page that sets a session cookie but does not show a login screen , just a blank page and the source of the page is also blank

So, i added the following line to my config.inc.php

$cfg['environment'] = 'development';

An right after, the following appeared

Array ( [type] => 1 [message] => Uncaught TypeError: PhpMyAdmin\ConfigStorage\Relation::__construct(): Argument #1 ($dbi) must be of type PhpMyAdmin\DatabaseInterface, null given, called in /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Twig/RelationExtension.php on line 22 and defined in /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/ConfigStorage/Relation.php:62 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Twig/RelationExtension.php(22): PhpMyAdmin\ConfigStorage\Relation->__construct() #1 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/ExtensionSet.php(426): PhpMyAdmin\Twig\RelationExtension->getFunctions() #2 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/ExtensionSet.php(411): Twig\ExtensionSet->initExtension() #3 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/ExtensionSet.php(385): Twig\ExtensionSet->initExtensions() #4 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(810): Twig\ExtensionSet->getUnaryOperators() #5 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Lexer.php(457): Twig\Environment->getUnaryOperators() #6 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Lexer.php(108): Twig\Lexer->getOperatorRegex() #7 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(466): Twig\Lexer->__construct() #8 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(516): Twig\Environment->tokenize() #9 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(348): Twig\Environment->compileSource() #10 /var/www/html/pma2/vendor/twig/twig/src/Environment.php(309): Twig\Environment->loadTemplate() #11 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Template.php(123): Twig\Environment->load() #12 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Template.php(156): PhpMyAdmin\Template->load() #13 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Core.php(145): PhpMyAdmin\Template->render() #14 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Config.php(684): PhpMyAdmin\Core::fatalError() #15 /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/Common.php(169): PhpMyAdmin\Config->checkPermissions() #16 /var/www/html/pma2/index.php(48): PhpMyAdmin\Common::run() #17 {main} thrown [file] => /var/www/html/pma2/libraries/classes/ConfigStorage/Relation.php [line] => 62 ) 

Turns out, this is an incompatibility (related to session storage) that has only been fixed in the 5.2 snapshot, download that version of phpmyadmin and everything should be fine