Category Archives: Allgemein

Repeating events in ICS files

Allgemein, PHP,

I am a huge fan of ICS files!

There! I said it!

ICS files (or iCalendar files) are the exchange-format for calendaring informations.

Whenever you need to transport calendaring information (Events, Todos, Free/Busy time) they are the way to go.

ICS files are defined in RFC 5545 with some additions in RFC 7986 and. a pretty good summary at iCalendar.org

The big trouble though in ran into with ICS files is the … interesting … interpretation and implementation of the standard. And yes: XKCD 927 comes to mind!

So whenever I want to use one of the lesser used features in ICS I create a test-file and import that into several calendaring tools out there. Namely Google Calendar, Outlook, Apples iCal, Thunderbird and Teamup.com

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Of Tools and Dependencies

Allgemein

Over the last few weeks I had a few discussions with other developers all along the same line of thought: How to install development-tools in a project.

Why? You might ask. Composer is making that very easy after all. When I need phpunit in my project to run unittests I use composer require phpunit/phpunit and composer itself will ask me whether I want to install that as a dev-dependency. How awesome is that! So why do we need to talk about that?

Well. Let’s put it that way: When you do that, and perhaps not only with phpunit but with other tools as well, you tie your production code to your development tools.

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Debug LDAP via TLS

Allgemein, authLdap, PHP,

Yesterday I had to do some debugging to find out why an LDAPS connection didn’t work.

The main trouble was that the authLdap plugin for WordPress didn’t work for someone. After a bit of back and forth we figured out that it worked for other applications but not for PHPs LDAP-extension.

The error they got was the usual cryptic Can't contact LDAP server which says nothing at all as that can mean so many different things.

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Email notification for SSH logins

Allgemein

On servers I maintain I usually have a script running that sends an email whenever someone logs in via SSH. It allows me to keep track on whether something fishy is going on in a very easy way.

It’s not bulletproof but at least provides me with a certain level of safety that everything is all right.

The other day I had to reinstall a server after some time and of course I had to – again – search for how to set that email script up.

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