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Well, here is a simple solution for you to reset your Joomla password in a few easy steps:

1. login to your site hosting control panel and look for phpmyadmin access
2. lookout for your Joomla database, select it, and open an SQL query window and type in it this query:

UPDATE  jos_users set password=md5(‘mynewpass’) WHERE username=”admin”

Now you will be able to login with mynewpass for the account admin, but i would advise a little bit of creativity in choosing another pass.

If it still does not work, give us a call, we might be able to help you faster in recovering your Joomla admin access details.

• insights for the term “future” shows an increasing in search around the end of the year in December, Canada users having an increased interest in the feature, followed by countries like India and Australia

• insights for the term “jobs” gains the highest interest in month July and decreases slowly until December, and then rebuilding the interest in the next year, Zimbabwe having an increased interest, followed by Kenya, Pakistan, and then again India

If you have found similar insight patterns, please care to share with us…

Data recovery

As you might know, disk drives, specially in high usage areas like hosting enviroments, have a tendency of crashing from time to time.

Most crashes you will encounter are related to bad blocks on your hard drive which in some cases will stop your operating system from booting, leaving your server at a stop. There are several utilities which can help you detect and fix the bad blocks at a software level, like the FSCK(file system check) available for Linux, or CHKDSK and SCANDISK for Windows, however there are situations when the bad block can’t be fixed, most of the cases due to a critical error.

While this doesn’t happen constantly or too often, it would be nice to think that there might be ways to recover data that might be business critical, and here is how:

DDRescue is recovery tool that will help you create an image of your hard drive, skip the bad blocks, and restore it on another hard disk! It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors. While this utility mostly runs on unix systems, it can deal with any type of disk drive data, whether it’s a linux system, windows, mac osx or something else.

We found this article to be fairly instructive giving all the restore procedures to handle a hard disk failure recovery.

If you are lucky, and the bad blocks were not containing some important booting data, your new cloned hard drive could be popped inside the server and ready to boot from it, resuming your server activity! If not, well you are still lucky you just need to do some more work to get the server up and booting again, fairly a system administrator job.

There are also hardware failures, when your hard disk might become unaccessible at a hardware level, in which case the best way to do is ship it back to the manufacturer company and let them replace the faulty parts, your important data might still get saved.

Best and always, make sure you always keep proper backups of your important data. Good luck!

DDRescue help: ddrescue -h

GNU ddrescue - Data recovery tool.
Copies data from one file or block device to another,
trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors.

Usage: ddrescue [options] infile outfile [logfile]
You should use a logfile unless you know what you are doing.

Options:
  -h, --help                    display this help and exit
  -V, --version                 output version information and exit
  -b, --block-size=      sector size of input device [default 512]
  -B, --binary-prefixes         show binary multipliers in numbers [SI]
  -c, --cluster-size=  sectors to copy at a time [128]
  -C, --complete-only           do not read new data beyond logfile limits
  -d, --direct                  use direct disc access for input file
  -D, --synchronous             use synchronous writes for output file
  -e, --max-errors=          maximum number of error areas allowed
  -F, --fill=            fill given type blocks with infile data (?*/-+)
  -g, --generate-logfile        generate approximate logfile from partial copy
  -i, --input-position=
    starting position in input file [0]
  -m, --domain-logfile=   restrict domain to finished blocks in file
  -n, --no-split                do not try to split or retry failed blocks
  -o, --output-position=
   starting position in output file [ipos]
  -q, --quiet                   suppress all messages
  -r, --max-retries=         exit after given retries (-1=infinity) [0]
  -R, --retrim                  mark all failed blocks as non-trimmed
  -s, --max-size=        maximum size of input data to be copied
  -S, --sparse                  use sparse writes for output file
  -t, --truncate                truncate output file to zero size
  -T, --try-again               mark non-split, non-trimmed blocks as non-tried
  -v, --verbose                 verbose operation
Numbers may be followed by a multiplier: b = blocks, k = kB = 10^3 = 1000,
Ki = KiB = 2^10 = 1024, M = 10^6, Mi = 2^20, G = 10^9, Gi = 2^30, etc...

Microsoft Web Platform

It seems that, earlier this year, Microsoft released a small application called Web Platform Installer , a utility meant to be dead simple to install a range of web applications and get your website up and going fast on a IIS server.

Beside the usual Microsoft web applications support like ASP.NET and SQL SERVER, they also added support for PHP, facilitating this way the installation of a range of web publishing tools like Drupal, Moodle and WordPress, hope I see some Joomla! there as it’s fairly popular.

Would also be nice to hear they also added support for Python, so that we can start serving code to Google, kidding , but it wouldbe nice.

A small review of this service can be found here , thanks to Louis Simoneau.

File encryption

Lets say those files contain some important data(ex. your credit card database data) and you are a little paranoid when thinking about unsecured network connections.

In case you are running Linux, you are in luck, the Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) is an free encryption tool that can encrypt or sign your files/archives with a password or an access key.

Basic usage

• open up a ssh terminal console

• Encryption command:

gpg -c <file_name>

- this will create a new file called <file_name>.gpg which is your encoded file

• Decryption command:

gpg <file_name>.gpg

The full online usage manual of the gpg command can be found on The GNU Privacy Guard Handbook webpage.

Good luck:)

While I do not have the details of their current relation, I’m inclined to say that his employee done this with specific actions in mind.

Needless to say, getting backdoor code is like finding needles in a haystack.

You would think by now, ok, why not recover the data from backups? Well that would be ideal, but here is what actually happen:

His hosting company were in charge of  creating backups of his server, however what they actually forgot to specify their client is that those backups are in fact disaster recovery backups and will not protect him for malicious actions, so they setup a daily and weekly backup process, the daily one would refresh itself each day, and the weekly one, each week on Monday as you might guess!

Well, over the weekend, his employee was busy, he managed to delete the database data. Now, the actual business owner gets back to the office on Monday and gets the surprise, a lot of sites have been compromised! Ok, no worries, we have backups, but wait, it’s Monday the backup process just flushed the weekly backup and the old ones are gone, leaving … nothing in place!

The story might have a happy end as we kept the clients data after the initial move, so we are able to recover them from there, however any updates in the meantime might be lost!

There are a lot of things each of us can learn from this story:

• always make sure you keep proper backups of your websites and are able to recover
• taking a day off to test recovery scenarios will help
• try to always keep an ethical point of view and make sure you employee the right people
• and again, always keep a backup, specially when you dealing with impotant data
• nobody cares more about your site than you, so don’t take for granted everything, do a checkup yourself

Getting the law on your side, will help…, but it might be to late!

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