Find out what real code a php eval(gzinflate(base64_decode contains

When you are dealing with a hacked or otherwise compromised website where someone has installed a backdoor or other kinds of malicious code you will often find php files with code packed into non-readable format using php eval, like eval(gzinflate(base64_decode.

To find out what the code does, copy the entire eval code (including “eval(“) into this site: http://ddecode.com/phpdecoder/

You will in the end get a human readable version of the code. Usually nasty stuff.

How to read a Mac disk or memory stick in a Windows computer

USB memory sticks or external disks that has been formatted on a Mac might not be readable if you connect it to a Windows computer. The reason is that the Mac has formatted it using a file system unknown by Windows.

To read the disk you can use the free tool hfsexplorer.

hfsexlorer

hfsexlorer

How to combine multiple .vcf files into one

If you have your contacts exported into .vcf files, they can easily be imported into for example iCloud, Google or your email program. However, if you have a couple of hundreds or thousands of contacts, and equally amount of .vcf files it will be very inefficient to import each contact one by one.

A solution is to combine all contacts into one single .vcf file. By importing the combined .vcf file all your contacts are imported at once.

To combine all .vcf files into a single one can easily be done using a Windows command prompt (cmd).

cd directory-path-where-your-vcf-files-are-located
copy *.vcf allcontacts.vcf

Now import the file allcontacts.vcf into iCloud or similar.

Magento2 System Upgrade fails via Setup Wizard – Error in Update!

When trying to upgrade Magento from 2.0.2 to 2.0.4 I got a windows saying Update in progress and the last line from the system log says “./composer.json has been updated” then nothing more happens for quite a long time. Finally an error screen displays “Error in Update!”.

To restart the update process while trying to figure out the error i had to manually delete the files var/.maintenance.flag and var/.update_in_progress.flag.

Magento System Upgrade error

Magento System Upgrade error

To make Magento run in Apache we had set php.ini for the web user to memory_limit=1024M and according to instructions, the cron jobs should be called with the -c pointing to the php.ini used by the web server, in our case /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini.

No error message revealed why the update failed but I found out that the php.ini we used for cron (/etc/php5/fpm/php.ini) had a memory_limit=128M. By editing this file and increasing it to 1024M the update worked.

Magento and always_populate_raw_post_data readiness test fails

When running the Magento readiness test it failed with the message that always_populate_raw_post_data should be set to -1 since it is running under php 5.6. Even though I tried different methods of setting it to -1 and I could verify it by calling phpinfo(); Magento still complained.

The way I solved is a bit rough and it required that I had full system administrator access to the machine (which I had because it was a dedicated server). This is how I solved it:

echo "always_populate_raw_post_data=-1" > /etc/php5/mods-available/always_populate_raw_post_data.ini
php5enmod always_populate_raw_post_data
service php5-fpm restart
service apache2 restart

Magento “Cron readiness check failed” solved

First of all, check the Magento guide on this problem here.

In my case, at first I didn’t get any errors in the cron logs in <web-root>/var/log. When running the scripts by hand as the website user I got the not so informing “Cron readiness check failed” in the <web-root>/var/log/update.cron.log.

The reason the “Cron readiness failed” was actually due to some files in the file and directory structure in the web root that can not be written by the cron update script. In my case I used the AWstats package to create website statistics placed in a directory called /stats. This directory and it’s file was not writeable by the cron script, causing it to fail, even though the directory /stats and it’s files are not a part of Magento.

I discovered this by investigating the content of the file var/.update_cronjob_status. In this file you can find important information on why the cron update script is failing.

postgrey whitelisting outlook.com

Greylisting is a way of reducing the amount of incoming spam and virus emails, in addition to other counter measures. Postgrey is a good choice if you are running postfix.

However, to be able to recieve emails from senders using outlook.com you need to whitelist it. This is because outlook.com is using a different host on each try to deliver the mail, causing delays up to hours, days or the mail not being delivered at all within time limits.

Create/edit the file /etc/postgrey/whitelist_clients.local and add:

# outlook.com
/^.*\.outbound\.protection\.outlook\.com$/
/^.*\.prod\.outlook\.com$/

Then execute:

service postgrey reload

Edit December 2021: The rule is changed from /^mail-.*\.outbound\.protection\.outlook\.com$/ to /^.*\.outbound\.protection\.outlook\.com$/ as Microsoft has changed their server naming standard.