Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label php.ini

Disable Display_Errors in Production

Its a simple message, but worth repeating. Yesterday I came across the website of a major internet security firm making a few first-day-on-the-job mistakes. While I am not going to "out" them before contacting them directly, what they did is silly enough that it warrants a bit of discussion in the abstract. Display_errors was enabled in their web server's php.ini. As a result, a few helpful messages were displayed briefly at the top of several of pages on the site 1. The name of the database 2. The name of the table in use by that page 3. A list of every column in that table 4. An error indicating that the table is exceeding its maximum allowable size of 4GB The site collects information about its users - IP address, browser info, referrer, etc, and stores that information to a table in a MySQL database - we know from the error itself that database is running on a server using a 32 bit operating system. With the structure of the database, we have everything we