Rotating webpage headline code - strange

Anon

I have some code that works on another site which rotates my webpages. First visitor will see zzz0.htm, the second will see zzz1.htm, until zzz3.htm. Then they see zzz0.htm again. Rotating, right?

My code works fine on my other website but fails to work on futurequest.

I have .htaccess as follows...

AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .htm

This is so my index_test.htm page is treated like a php page. All files, including count.inc are in the main directory.

It works fine on my other site, as already stated. However, I have problems getting it to work with my futurequest.com hosting account. I believe the reason MAY be because they are running in \"safe_mode\". This impacts on the include() statement (I think).

My code that rotates the pages is...

[PHP<?php
//Simple PHP headline swapper
if (file_exists(\'count.inc\'))
{
//if file exists..read the last supplied file.
$fil = fopen(\'count.inc\', \'r\');
$dat = fread($fil, filesize(\'count.inc\'));
fclose($fil);
}
else
{
//if it doesnt exist. create one.
// in ur code , if file doesnt exist, it wont display any headers. i have corrected it here.
$fil = fopen(\'count.inc\', \'w\');
fwrite($fil, 0);
fclose($fil);
$dat = 0;
}

//using include to display the appropriate page:

$filename = \'zzz\'.$dat.\'.htm\';
include(\"$filename\");

// my approach for rewinding value of dat..
if($dat > 2) {
$dat = 0;
}
else
{
$dat++;
}

//now write in the new value...
$fil = fopen(\'count.inc\', \'w\');
fwrite($fil, $dat);
fclose($fil);
?>
[/code]

Can anyone see a reason why this code does not run, especially since I just copied and pasted it from my other site? Or, because of the impact of safe_mode, what can I do to rememdy the situation?

Thanks,

Jon

brandonschnell

1) whats the error message?

2) why write to a file keeping track of users like that? consider a fast random number generator to choose one of the three pages. it'll scale better and be easier to troubleshoot. if you do use a file to loop through the pages in that fashion, at least flock() the "count.inc" file for any read/write functions.

hmmm. on many hosts apache is running as user nobody.nobody for all users. this means count.inc is read/write for everyone who has access to create php scripts and your php files are also visible to everyone (readable). if apache can write to a directory and if apache is running under the same userid for all of the accounts then we can do something interesting here even if apache doesn't have write access to your html files.

from a completely different account on the same server use telnet or a php script to create another folder under your web root called "zzz". next, create a html file called
"hacked.htm" with the appropriate comments in it in the test account directory. now assuming your web root is located at:
/www/yourdomain/
and the other account is in a similiar directory, edit count.inc to say:
"/../../test_account/hacked"
for the finale chmod the count.inc file to be read only.

this of course assumes all of the web pages are running under the same user (i know, i know, many web hosts have this setup properly with apache running under differnt users). and assumes apache can write to your web root (apache can already create the count.inc file right?)

i wonder if it would work? i could probably tell you tomarrow why it won't work after i get some sleep. =)