Well of course there’s a way in PHP – debug_backtrace. Just add something similar in a suitable place in your code and you’ll be able to find what functions were called.

$trace=debug_backtrace();
$caller = $trace[1]['function'];
// or just dump all the info
var_dump($trace);

After some searching of my own, it turns out that IIS6 on Windows Server 2003 (possibly XP too) will not properly read the PATH variable. So if you add the path to your PHP directory to the end of PATH, the DLLs required are still not found. This looks to affect IIS6 specifically as filesystem calls to the same DLLs did find them.

The solution – add the path to your PHP install to the start or earlier in the PATH variable and restart IIS. In my experience you will now see the LDAP options appear in your phpinfo() output.

In this post I’ll pass on the methods I found to get PHP and your Linux boxes talking out through a corporate ISA proxy server. You can then bring in RSS feeds, updates and other things in WordPress and use apt-get to update Ubuntu.

cntlm

To start with we need to install cntlm on a Linux box (I’ll mention Ubuntu here but any flavour should work with a couple of tweaks). cntlm is “an NTLM / NTLM Session Response / NTLMv2 authenticating HTTP proxy“. Basically your non-Windows machines and apps can now talk to cntlm which will then talk to the ISA proxy in your organisation. So you stay within your corporate infrastructure and keep the security guys happy.

Download the deb installation package to your Ubuntu machine and install it with,

sudo dpkg -i cntlm_0.35.1-1_i386.deb

Open the config file for cntlm and edit it to add in your ISA proxy information and a valid user, domain and password that has web access with download rights. Further down the settings make sure gateway is enabled and you set suitable restrictions on the IP ranges that can use cntlm.

sudo nano /etc/cntlm.conf

Restart cntlm to make sure it gets the new settings,

sudo /etc/init.d/cntlm restart

Test your cntlm configuration by attempting to get to an external website,

sudo cntlm -M http://www.google.com -u your_user@your_domain -p your_password your_isa_proxy:port

apt-get

Configure apt-get to use the new proxy by editing the apt-get config,

sudo nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf

and add this line pointing to your cntlm proxy gateway. Change the IP and port if you’ve installed cntlm on another machine or different port.

Acquire::http::proxy "http://127.0.0.1:3128";

WordPress

Add these extra lines to the wp-config.php file in your WordPress directory. This works from version 2.8 onward and means you can keep your install and plugins up to date and secure. Again, make sure you change the IP and port to that of your cntlm proxy gateway. You may be able to comment out the username and password if things don’t work as expected. It’ll depend on your cntlm configuration.

define('WP_PROXY_HOST', '127.0.0.1');
define('WP_PROXY_PORT', '3128');
define('WP_PROXY_USERNAME', 'my_user_name');
define('WP_PROXY_PASSWORD', 'my_password');
define('WP_PROXY_BYPASS_HOSTS', 'localhost, www.example.com');

With any luck you now have a Linux machine and WordPress install that can easily be kept up to date inside your corporate environment.

What Outlook 2003 (and 2002 and 2007 versions apparently) likes to do is be super helpful and remove what it regards as extra line breaks. It won’t be consistent either within a single mail or across many but it will make the content difficult to read. What you thought would be new lines will now be joined up in places and it seems to happen more often the further through the content you go.

There don’t seem to be many fixes for this issue but there are a few work arounds to help out.

1. Turn off this “feature” in Outlook in the Tools»Options menu. Honestly I’m not sure what use it is anyway. Unfortunately you’d have to do this on all the recipient’s computers.
2. Use HTML in your email rather than plain text. Depending on your content and need for complete accuracy, perhaps more time than it’s worth.
3. Add twice the number of line breaks where you currently have them. This seems to help but now your email is rather full of white space and may be more difficult to read.

Other than changing email clients, which is pretty unlikely, that’s about it. If you know of other options to try and get Outlook to not remove line breaks, please leave a comment below. This Microsoft KB article explains which versions of Outlook are affected http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287816.

The reason for running up a Windows server as opposed to the typical LAMP alternative on Windows was due to frustration. The older Ubuntu server I had just made it very difficult to install the versions of PHP and MySQL that I wanted.

Applications I used were:
Apache 2.0.55
PHP 4.4.2
MySQL 4.1.18
Subverison 1.3

Download
The application packages you need to download are:
apache_2.0.55-win32-x86-no_ssl.msi
mysql-essential-4.1.18-win32.msi
php-4.4.2-Win32.zip
svn-1.3.0-setup.exe
svnservice (to run Subversion as a Windows service/daemon)

Installation
Now we’ve downloaded the right files we need to install them. for the most part this involves double-clicking the installer package and clicking Next a few times.

Install MySQL and use the Server Config tool to set options including Network Access.
Install Apache to the default location.
Unzip the PHP files to c:\php folder.
Install Subversion using the package defaults.
Unzip the SVNService tool to the Subversion folder and copy the SVNService.exe file to the bin directory.

Configuration

PHP
In the c:\php folder, copy the file php.ini-recommended to php.ini. Change the line that says,
doc_root =
to read
doc_root = c:\progra~1\apache~1\apache\htdocs

Set the error reporting to a more appropriate level by changing the line that reads,
error_reporting = E_ALL
to
error_reporting = E_ERROR|E_PARSE

Copy php.ini to your Windows folder eg. c:\windows\

Add the directory path c:\php to your system PATH variable, through My Computer→Properties→Advanced
Apache

Open the file c:\progra~1\apache~1\apache\conf\httpd.conf and add the following lines,
LoadModule php4_module "c:/php/php4apache2.dll"
and further down,
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

Edit: I neglected to add in some other lines when writing this. In the Apache conf file’s Module section add,
LoadModule dav_svn_module "C:/Program Files/Subversion/bin/mod_dav_svn.so"
LoadModule authz_svn_module "C:/Program Files/Subversion/bin/mod_authz_svn.so"
Of course you should change the path to match that of the library files in your Subversion install folder.

Create a file in c:\progra~1\apache~1\apache\htdocs called test.php. In that file place this text,

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Restart the server

Open your browser and go the URL http://your_server/test.php.

You should see a page listing the current PHP settings. If not, check that the Apache service is running and that you can browse to http://. If that works then check the PHP configuration.

Subversion
Create a folder to hold your Subversion repository eg. c:\svn. In that folder create your folder structure for your code. Check the Subversion docs for the guidelines on how to do this the best way. To simply create a new repository called ‘project’ type the following line at a command prompt.
svnadmin create c:\svn\project

At a command prompt type,
svnservice -install -d -r c:\svn\project
which installs and starts the SVN service and tells it to run as a daemon (-d) and point to your code repository (-r xxxxx).

Open up Apache’s config file again (httpd.conf) and add the following code at the bottom of the file,
<Location /subversion>
DAV svn
SVNPath c:/svn/project
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Subversion Repository"
AuthUserFile conf/svnusers.conf
Require valid-user
</Location>
This tells Apache that any requests for http://your_server/subversion, will use web_dav to look at your code repository at c:\svn\project and only let authorized users see it.

Now we still need to tell Apache who is allowed to view our Subversion repository and who can read and write to our repo(sitory) too. At the cmd prompt again change directory to your Apache conf folder and type,
htpasswd -c svnusers.conf username
making sure you replace the ‘username’ with your real username. You’ll be asked to provide a password for that user which Apache will use.

And in the ‘project’ repo at c:\svn\project open the conf folder and edit the svnserve.conf file with a text editor. Uncomment a few lines until you have at least,
[general]
anon-access = read ## Can be none, read, write
auth-access = write ## Can be none, read, write
password-db = passwd ## Filename of users store
realm = My Project

Now we need to create a passwd file to store the usernames and password used to control access to the repository. It’s a s imple as a text file with the lines below in it. Add extra users on new line but watch that both username and password are case sensitive.
[users]
myuser= mypassword

Extras
If you are unable to connect to the MySQL server using PHPMyAdmin or similar and receive a message like,
Error 1251: “Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client”, do not despair.

From a MySQL prompt on your server run the command below for each affected user@machine combination.

SET PASSWORD FOR user@localhost = OLD_PASSWORD('password');

Making sure you replace the ‘user’ and ‘password’ with your own details.

Conclusion
Hope that all made sense, if not just leave a comment.