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    Howdy from Trainsim.com

    I'm a new owner of a legacy 4.2.5 forum hosted at Trainsim.com , and totally drinking from a firehose on vBulletin and its quirks.

    Hoping this site will give me a crash course in the finer points before I make a decision to upgrade to v5 or move to open source.

    #2
    Welcome to vBMods.rocks Eolesen!

    Hope you'll find this site useful. Enjoy your stay!
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      #3
      Thanks.... I've taken the test demo drive already for V5, but it's leaving me with some unanswered questions. I'm still digging and searching here as well, but here's the connundrum:


      We have a file library on our site that pre-dates VB4, and moving it to attachments is really not an option.

      There are over 35,000 files and catalog search functions that read from a DB custom table, and we hide the file structure outside the HTML directories when creating the download files. We also have ZLib functionality to preview the ZIP before downloading, which is key functionality for our users.

      Functionally, it's maybe five or six pages that are used for things such as New Files, the search & response, viewing the contents, downloading, etc...

      Feel free to look at https://trainsim.com to see how it works.

      In the v5 sales material, I'm not finding a whole lot of info on how I might be able to continue using a DB query to build download links for worthy users while still staying inside the site's wrapper for look/feel/navbars as well as leveraging the security... (It doesn't help that we can't find the license info from 12 years ago to get "official" help from the vBulletin forums.)

      Conceptually, is there a fairly easy way to wrap vanilla PHP for handling the file read/write/move functionality inside the v5 structure?


      In a response from 2017, this was a suggestion to a similar question:

      Use Static HTML module and include the php file using iframe tag.​
      Does that still work, or was it locked down after the PHP module was killed off?

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by Eolesen View Post
        Does that still work, or was it locked down after the PHP module was killed off?
        <p>We've created a new package that is intended to facilitate the replacement of custom PHP modules with custom Display Template


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          #5
          Saw that earlier, but can't say I understand it as easily as I did the iframe suggestion. Gonna have to try both in the demo.

          Comment


            #6
            You will not be able to do it on a vB5 trial demo since you don't have access to the server. It requires uploading packages to /core/packages directory containing your custom API that will be called from a template.

            Here's another post from a vB5 support staff on how to create a basic vB5 mod.



            The vB5 package also contains sample PHP Hooks and custom API in the /do_not_upload/development folder.
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              #7
              Thanks... turns out the previous owner had bought a license for vb5 on a site that was migrated to IPB. Now I can try this on 5.6.0 and 5.7.3 with a test Install ( which I was planning to do regardless because I want to get virtualmin installed cleanly).

              Aside from not using that version, is there a workaround that will harden 5.6.0 from the zero day vulnerability?

              I'm not sure whether running on php5.4 or vb5.6 is a bigger security flaw.... if I can run 5.6 with those pages protected, that would buy me some time to build the API which is the better long-term solution.

              Comment


                #8
                Did you apply the security patch for 5.6.0?

                <p>A security exploit has been reported within vBulletin 5.6.1 and earlier versions. To fix this issue, we have created a new security patch.</p> <p>You can download the patch for your version in the <a href="http://members.vbulletin.com/patches.php">Member's Area</a></p>


                There were also known vulnerabilities in later versions.

                <p>A security issue has been reported to the vBulletin team. To fix this issue, we have created a new security patch.</p> <p>You can download the patch for your version in the <a href="http://members.vbulletin.com/patches.php">Member's Area</a></p> <p>We have made patches


                You should at least upgrade to 5.6.4 and apply the patch but it's best to upgrade to the latest version 5.7.3
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                  #9
                  I haven't installed anything yet, but it sounds like I should start with 5.6.4 and at least PL1 unless PL2 kept the module intact. I thoughti read a Wayne Luke post where he inferred PL2 removed it.
                  Since this is an hourly Cloud Server, I'm trying to set up a block of time where I can do a quick install, run a quick regression test or two and then blow it all up or power it down so that I'm not paying for a test environment at production rates.

                  Thanks for the direction. I'll send some coffee when I get a chance to sit down at a keyboard....


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                    #10
                    You can install it on your local using XAMPP or similar tools. That's what I use on my local vB5 installation.
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                      #11
                      I prefer the cloud test deployment option... its easier to clone the existing server and wipe the clone when I get into trouble. Once I get a stable configuration, swapping for my production site is done in minutes. Testing in Windows and deployment in Linux has been a problem in the past. There's a cost, but it's only $0.03 per hour.... most of the vm's don't stay up for more than 8 hours.
                      ​​​​
                      I was able to get thru installation multiple times but wound up with the same error each time..

                      1) rendering is naked without stylesheets
                      2) paths are defaulting to the site root instead of the subdirectory I installed the site under
                      3) couldn't launch admincp after logging in

                      Will do a few more attempts today. I suspect http/https is messing with the stylesheets and login. The documentation and defaults are all http even though the new standard seems to be https...

                      On the production site, we have the vb4 installation in a domain root/forums hierarchy. Am I correct that the directory structure should look like root/forums/core when it's installed, and .htaccess will redirect everything accordingly? That didn't seem to be working. Everything was still going to the domain root instead of the subdirectory. If I manually edited the URL to insert the subdirectory, I would get one page further and then it would be remapped to the root again. On my last attempt I just gave up on the subdirectory and installed into the domain root and that behaved aside from the issues one and three above.

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                        #12
                        Did you rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess?
                        Make sure you have a redirect rule on server configuration or htaccess file to redirect all variations of URL (with/without www and http/https) to redirect to the forum URL configured in AdminCP. This ensures that users will always land to the correct URL and avoid login issue and mixed http/https issue.
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                          #13
                          To your question, I did overlook the .htaccess on a couple attempts. It was there for the later ones, but then a PHP configuration issue got me into a different dark corner.


                          Definitely some errors in my process, so I took a step back today. Built a fully functioning clone of my production 4.2.5 box but with PHP7.2 and MySQL 8.0 on Ubunto 22.04 --- our prod box runs PHP 5.6 and MySQL 5.7 on an older Ubuntu 18.04 distro so there are a few quantum leaps being made here...

                          Having that functional, I'm cloning the clone to do the destructive testing and trying the upgrade to v5.6.4 tonight. Fingers crossed.

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                          • glennrocksvb
                            glennrocksvb commented
                            Editing a comment
                            Thanks for the coffee! ☕

                          #14
                          And now I have a functioning version 5.6.4....... without any of the 1.2M posts available. That's going to be interesting to figure out.

                          The posts are still in the post table, which is a good thing.

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                            #15
                            OK, I'm my worst example of too many hours looking at the same problem and getting in my own way.

                            Earlier when I got my clean install, I ran install.php instead of upgrade.php......

                            Big. Difference.

                            Running upgrade.php now from command line and seeing 2.1 million records convert is a good sign that it's time to get sleep let this run overnight.

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