I haven’t posted here in a long while, and no doubt that will continue unfortunately. However, tonight I’ve learnt (or in some cases re-learnt) a few, albeit simple, lessons and it felt sensible to note it down so I can remember in the future.
Double Quotes vs. Single Quotes in PHP
This was a massive rookie error and a sign that I haven’t worked in PHP much over the past year.
While tightening my database security, I ended up patching up some dodgy db related code in PHP in a particularly old project. I spent nearly half an hour trying to work out why my passworded database user was being denied access to the database.
After a bit of debugging, I noticed the password was being cut off in the middle, and after further debugging and tracing the string back, I noticed that my randomly generated, double quoted password string happened to have a ‘$’ character in it.
PHP (among other languages) tries to resolve variables within double quoted strings, meaning “abc123$efg456” is resolved to “abc123”, if the variable $efg456 doesn’t exist in your script. The solution was to simply exchange the double quotes for single quotes.
Lesson: If you’re working in a language which treats double and single quoted strings differently, check you’re using the right ones!
.htaccess redirection
.htaccess always ends up leeching away my time. This time I was trying to set up some redirects to treat a sub-directory as the root directoy, but only if the file or directory didn’t exist in the root directory and did exist in the sub-directory.
This is simple enough if you know what the .htaccess variables mean, but in using examples and making assumptions I tripped myself up. So here’s the bit I learnt:
%{REQUEST_FILENAME} – This isn’t just the filename that was requested, but the absolute path from the root of the server.
%{REQUEST_URI} – This is the filename on its own.
%{DOCUMENT_ROOT} – This is usually the path up to the root directory of your site (though I’m quite sure this is not always the case).
So given the path “/a/file/path/to/a/website/index.html”:
%{REQUEST_FILENAME} = /a/file/path/to/a/website/index.html
%{REQUEST_URI} = index.html
%{DOCUMENT_ROOT} = /a/file/path/to/a/website
Simple when you know, but confusing otherwise! In any case, here’s the resulting rule I cobbled together:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/other%{REQUEST_URI} -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /other/$1 [L,QSA]
That won’t suffice if you need directories to work as expected, and it will only apply to files, but it’s as much as I need for now.
Lesson: Don’t assume things, especially when dealing with something as powerful as .htaccess files. The more you know and use it, the less of a pain it will be.
NAT Loopback and remote IPs not working locally
Having acquired a new domain name today, I decided to put it to work as a domain for my home server (with help from no-ip). Having set it all up, I came across a peculiar scenario where I was able to access the machine remotely with the domain (the outward facing IP), I was able to access the machine locally with the local IP address, but I was unable to access the machine locally with the public IP or domain name.
In a few minutes I realised that this was not so peculiar at all. The Network Address Translation (NAT) rules decide where inbound requests should go when it hits the router, I have my router set up to allow certain connections to forward through to my server. However, these rules don’t apply to requests which pass through the router on the way out. I’d only be guessing, but I’d imagine this is because responses to requests across the Internet would otherwise have these rules applied to them as well, completely breaking the network.
To solve this issue, NAT loopback, a feature or further rule which resolves requests to the router’s public IP from inside the network correctly, is available in many routers. It is commonly turned off due to security concerns, or simply may not be available in some routers.
Unfortunately, my Huawei HG533 router falls into the latter group, with no obvious plans of an upgrade which would fix this.
Lesson: If you want to use one address to access a machine locally and remotely, ensure NAT Loopback is set up.
All simple stuff, but it’s been interesting learning about it all. Hopefully I can continue documenting the small things like this over the next year, my final year of university should be a steep learning curve!
andrewBridge 