Posts Tagged ‘admin’

Automatic Upgrade Feature of WordPress Without FTP

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

I was intrigued by the automatic update feature of recent (2.7+?) versions of WordPress because I hate upgrades as much as the next guy.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work for all 3 WordPress installs for which I am responsible.

There’s a new security issue for WordPress, so I spent some time trying to figure out how to get the update feature to work.  When I attempted the update in the WordPress Admin section, it requested my FTP login settings.  Well, I don’t use FTP for maintaining these blogs.

Fortunately, it turns out that WordPress will only require FTP permissions if the file permissions are configured in a compatible manner.

This post cleared it up:

http://robspencer.net/auto-update-wordpress-without-ftp/

The gist is to set the owner of the WordPress files to the same user as the process that runs Apache.  Running a basic chown command did the trick!

Now I just have to research to make sure that this makes sense from a security standpoint…

A free schtasks.exe equivalent for XP Home edition

Monday, December 15th, 2008

It’s funny how one stumbles upon the finer differences between XP Home and XP Professional once in a while. Every good geek knows the biggest limits to XP Home such as no ability to join a corporate network, no Remote Desktop, and no encrypted file system (EFS).  But who knew about a tiny utility that will run a Windows Scheduled Task from the command line? That would be “schtasks.exe”, and it’s not included in XP Home.

The background: I needed a Limited User in Windows to be able to do something requiring Administrative permissions.  There are a few ways to do this, but in this situation, running a scheduled task was the obvious best choice because the task was already there as an overnight maintenance job.

A quick Google search for “run scheduled task from command line” will lead you to the aforementioned schtasks tool.  Well, I could copy the file from an XP Pro workstation, but that would violate Microsoft’s copywrite.

Fortunately, more searching will turn up a reference to an old MS tool “jt.exe” from it’s Windows 2000 Resource Kit.  You can get individual tools from the W2K ResKit here: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/reskit/win2000/. The license to JT and is much more permissive.  You’re free to use it, but at your own risk.

The “JT” syntax is not straight forward to me.  But these the two examples will probably help:

This lists all tasks: jt.exe /se

This will run (“activate”?) a task (you do not need to include the .job in the TaskName): jt.exe /sac TaskName /rj

On the XP Home Edition computer I was setting this on, the Limited User could run all the scheduled tasks, even when it couldn’t “see” the task in the list. YMMV.

One could  make this end-user friendly by wrapping a batch file around it and put an icon with a link to your script on the Desktop.