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If any customers are reading this, then thanks for all your support over the years.

Watch this space for new products and new branches of the business.

What I wanted to do was, vailidate the generated xml files against a schema, before saving them.

You can do this via the command using xmllint.

xmllint –schema atom.xsd.xml –valid –noout /xmlfiles/.test.xml.tmp

However you can easily do this in PHP.

Here are the schema files.

siteindex
sitemap
atom.xsd

static function validate_google_xml($xmlfile, $type)
{

print("Validating {$xmlfile} \n");

$xdoc = new DomDocument;
if($type == 'siteindex')
{
$schema = self::$scriptDir.'siteindex.xsd';
@$xdoc->Load($xmlfile);
if (@$xdoc->schemaValidate($schema))
{
return true;
}
}elseif($type == 'sitemap')
{
$schema = self::$scriptDir.'sitemap.xsd';
//echo $schema ; die;
@$xdoc->Load($xmlfile);
if (@$xdoc->schemaValidate($schema))
{
return true;
}

}elseif($type == 'atom')
{
$schema = self::$scriptDir.'atom.xsd.xml';
//echo $schema ; die;
@$xdoc->Load($xmlfile);
if (@$xdoc->schemaValidate($schema))
{
return true;
}

}

}

The software is coming along nicely. We hope to have the new website and the beta, available by the end of next month.

Here are a few teaser screen shots.

SmudgeVMM is being written in CakePHP and will run as a stand alone webservice, on any Centos Xen server.

Features include: Multiple interfaces (WAN and LAN), SAS storage (iscsi and NAS), package templates, support for most flavors of linux, integration with most hosting shopping carts, reseller and multi user level permissions along with complete Xen VPS container management.

Warning please make sure you leave enough space for the files inside, or data may be lost.

First make sure the files system isn’t mounted then.

e2fsck -f /dev/VolGroup00/disk1_rootimg
resize2fs -p /dev/VolGroup00/disk1_rootimg 15G
lvreduce –size 15G /dev/VolGroup00/disk1_rootimg
resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/disk1_rootimg

This should reduce the file system to 15G

It involved me creating Joomla components and those annoying XML files, listing all the files and folders to install.

If you want a quick command to generate the xml, you can cd to the directory then run

find * -type f -exec  echo ‘<filename>’{}’</filename>’ \;

find * -type d -exec  echo ‘<folder>’{}’</folder>’ \;

Then you can copy the output from the terminal and paste between the files tags.

<files folder=”components/com_test”>
<filename>controller.php</filename>
<filename>css/test.css</filename>
<filename>views/test/tmpl/index.html</filename>
<filename>test.php</filename>
<folder>css</folder>
<folder>images</folder>
<folder>install_sql</folder>
<folder>models</folder>
<folder>player</folder>
<folder>views</folder>
<folder>views/user</folder>
<folder>views/user/tmpl</folder>
<folder>views/test</folder>
<folder>views/test/tmpl</folder>
</files>

I repeated this for the administrator/components/com_test and components/com_test folders

I searched and tried many control panels.

Openqrm – I found this over kill
karesansui – This is very nice looking and polished but seemed quite slow.
VDS Manager – Still in beta for Xen

I’ve now decided to create the VM’s by hand. I then hope to make a PHP control panel of my own. Here are my steps for creating Xen VPS’s using the command line and Centos 5.

I’m going to create a vm called testvm

First I needed to find out what Volume groups exist on my system and what the VG Name was

lvdisplay

VG Name                VolGroup00

Create the disks for the VM and format

lvcreate -L8.5G -n testvm_rootimg VolGroup00
lvcreate -L 384M -n testvm_vmswap VolGroup00
mke2fs /dev/VolGroup00/testvm_rootimg
tune2fs -j /dev/VolGroup00/testvm_rootimg
mkswap /dev/VolGroup00/testvm_vmswap
mkdir /mnt/img
mkdir /mnt/vm

Now mount your disk image. I’ve created a custom hardened Centos distro, but you could use Jailtime Images

mount -o loop centos.5-3.64-smudge.img  /mnt/img
mount /dev/VolGroup00/looop_rootimg /mnt/vm

Copy the image onto your new partition

cp -a /mnt/img/* /mnt/vm/

Now all you need to do is configure the hostname, ip etc on the VM.

vi /mnt/vm/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=87.xxx.xxx.xxx
NETMASK=255.255.255.xxx
ONBOOT=yes

Change the hostname

vi /mnt/vm/etc/sysconfig/network

If your using Jailtime images people have advised to change this line to the following:

vi /mnt/vm/etc/inittab
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty console

vi /mnt/vm/etc/ssh/sshd_config
PermitRootLogin yes

vi /mnt/vm/etc/fstab

Add the line:

/dev/sda2     swap   swap     defaults     0     0

umount /mnt/img /mnt/vm

You will need a ram disk to boot from. This can be created by running:

mkinitrd /boot/xen-guest-initrd `uname -r` –with xenblk –with xennet –preload xenblk –preload xennet –omit-scsi-modules

Now all you need to do is create the config file and give it an IP/ Mac address.Please check which kernel you are using first and change – kernel = “/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.14.el5xen”…

kernel = “/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.14.el5xen”
ramdisk    = ‘/boot/xen-guest-initrd’
maxmem = 192
memory = 192
vcpus = 1
name = “testvm”
vif = [ 'ip=87.xxx.xxx.xxx,bridge=xenbr0, rate = 1000KB/s, mac=aa:00:23:b0:de:34' ]
serial     = ‘pty’
disk       = ['phy:/dev/VolGroup00/testvm_rootimg,sda1,w', 'phy:/dev/VolGroup00/testvm_vmswap,sda2,w']
root = ‘/dev/sda1 ro’
on_poweroff = ‘destroy’
on_reboot   = ‘restart’
on_crash    = ‘restart’

All is ready to go.

Just run:

xm create testvm

And you VPS should be now running:

check with
xm console testvm

Hope this helps.

Smudge IT will be lauching  a new site and Xen Vps systems soon. Watch this space..

This way I can use table locking for MyISAM or transactions, for InnoDB, to make sure the data gets copied across.

I mainly use this method for archiving tables and keep the primary keys the same.

I have 2 tables created called ads and adsarchives.

What you do is make a copy of your database structure called adsarchives, and change the primary key so that it doesn’t auto increment. This mean that you can’t copy the same data twice. Also the second query won’t delete your data from the source on a fail.

( Oh by the way, my first example is using Cakephp on a MyISAM table) It would be much better to do transactions for this. But I wasn’t updating an InnoDB table.

function archiveads($monthsold=false){

if(is_numeric($monthsold) & $monthsold > 1){

$range = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime("-{$monthsold} months"));

$db =& ConnectionManager::getDataSource($this->useDbConfig);

$this->query('LOCK TABLES ads READ, adsarchives WRITE');
$this->query("INSERT INTO adsarchives SELECT ads.* FROM ads WHERE ads.enddate < '{$range}'");

$error = $db->lastError();

$this->query('UNLOCK TABLES');

if(!$error) { $this->query("DELETE FROM ads WHERE  ads.enddate < '{$range}'") ; return true;}else{

$this->log('FATAL Error archiving the Ads |'.$error);

}

}else{

return false;
}

}

If you want the raw SQl way of doing it try this. I’m archiving 3 month old data.

LOCK TABLES ads READ, adsarchives WRITE;
SET @age=(CURRENT_DATE()- INTERVAL 3 MONTH), @today=CURRENT_DATE();

INSERT INTO adsarchives
SELECT ads.*
FROM ads WHERE ads.enddate < @age;

UNLOCK TABLES;
DELETE FROM ads WHERE  ads.enddate < @age;