So here's a hard-found tip about how to call a Smarty plugin function -- you delineate parameters with spaces, not a comma or a bar. You need to do this

{customer_functions expires=$cust[c].expires paymenttypeid=$cust[c].paymenttypeid assign='rowclass'}

This lets you visually show whether a row is overdue and what payment type they are using. Comma-separated would be a lot easier to read.

Let's see what else it takes longer to figure out with Smarty than it should.

A handy little cron command for Ubuntu is @reboot. For some reason I am too lazy to research properly I kept getting

[psad-status] firewall setup warning

on startup. Not hard to fix, but annoying. So creating a quick script to run

/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -j LOG
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -j LOG

and call it from crontab with

@reboot /home/pms/iptables-set.sh

does the trick.

A little something to save frustration when working with rsync and public/private keys. Be sure to pass the key you'd like to use (if not using default values):

ssh -i /root/.ssh/key_file_you_want_to_use

And if you're using cPanel, you might consider using

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/cpuwatch 1.5

to limit CPU usage when running something that might take a while (like rsync-ing your backups to external locations). The 1.5 parameter above checks to make sure the server load is below that value before continuing.

This mainly helps me since I will inevitably forget this and need to know where to look. Leaving these breadcrumbs around makes a certain kind of sense.

So, if you're running into the "I have an authentication key all set why won't it work right" and you've gone through all the helpful suggestions like "make sure permissions" and "check sshd config", one last thing to check would be what you named your private key when you ran ssh-keygen.

If you named it something other than the default prompted filename, you need to use the -i switch when trying to ssh so it will know where to look. So try

ssh -i /path/to/your_clever_filename user@hostname


You're welcome.

Since I really have no over-arching plan for this site (beyond using it as a playground for what-nots and whos-its), be prepared for some Weird Things to show themselves on occasion.

It also doesn't help that I have design adh LET'S ADD COLORS!

When you see an error in Firebug mentioning syntax error for doctype or some such, check to see that all of your scripts are loading properly. A 404 error can cause this notice to crop up and YOU'LL WASTE MINUTES WONDERING ABOUT IT.

...categories. Yay.

It seems I find something new to add each time I log in. (I mean this in the code-sense, less so in the meaningful-writing-sense. I feel this is obvious). The trick is not to overdo it with all the bells and whitles. I will try to stick to just bells. Hate whitles.

YES I SAID WHITLES.