Converting phpBB2CH aka Ptifo to phpBB3

On my  installed board (still partially found on m2tec.be/forum) I installed phpBB2CH (Categories Hierarchy)  also known as Ptifo.

Basically it adds sub-forums, forum links, advanced permissions, board announcements and many more features.
It broke support with most (or better said with almost all) mods for phpBB2. But had or has a pretty large community (ptifo.clanmckeen.com is offline at the moment of writing).

As phpBB3 came out and there was also build-in support for those features, I wished to upgrade. But because of the changes on phpBB2, the phpBB2 converters wasn’t converting half of my forum settings. So I needed to create a converter. As the basics where the same I could use the phpBB2 converter to start with.

Yesterday somebody contacted me, and said the converter wasn’t working anymore. As my converter was basically made for phpBB 3.0.2 and the current version is phpBB 3.0.7-PL1, I can understand why.

I updated my converter to work with phpBB 3.0.7-PL1, and so here you can find the converter for phpbb2CH to phpBB 3.0.7-PL1.
It isn’t 100% testing on all functions, but most stuff is converted. The predefined permissions aren’t, as they are (almost) impossible to do.

A few thing you maybe want to know:

• main admins will be admins with founder status
• admins and main admins will both in the admin group.
• attachments are converted

If you find any bugs, tell me, I’m happy to solve them.

I needed to make a program in java which logins with the vBulletin login system.
As you may know, many php boards use MD5 for hashing passwords.
vBulletin uses a “more advanced way” of hashing, just like phpBB3. phpBB2 used just old plain MD5 hashes.
So I needed to find out how I could use MD5 in java.

Off course there is no MD5 function like in php .
That’s why I searched a function that can do it, a little search on google like “java MD5 function” and so I looked at the first pages links and tried the functions that weren’t too long.

FAIL

I created the vBulletin login system in java and with the first test account I could login …. BUT my own login failed . Quite irritating if you try 10 passes, all work and when you put it live, many people complaining they can’t login…

As I got “lucky” with my pass, I found that my hashed login was wrong, so after some debugging I found a 0 (zero) was missing in the first MD5. So the MD5 function was WRONG:(

As a test, I created a program that creates random passwords and create the MD5 of it with the functions I found on different sites (found by using  google).

Extra info

Both MySQL and php’s MD5 function has a hex notation, clearly not all MD5-functions found are hex notated, this is not a must, but off course needed for being compatible with php/MySQL.

The problem

In the next image you can see the standard behavior of the MD5-function found.
Most of them looks okay, but notice that the one from bombaydigital uses uppercase hex notation, and by using it for another round with MD5 it will go wrong.
The one found on Stockoverflow clearly doesn’t use hex-notation. And the one from Spiration, lost a 0 (zero).

MD5 function output from different sites

With double MD5 you see the differences even faster, like shown in the next image:

differences seen by using double use of MD5 functions found for java

The first marked line, you see that Spiration’s MD5 is wrong, in the second marked line, you see Spirition’s MD5 is ok. So it’s not reliable.
In the first and second marked lines you can see that dzone’s MD5  is ok, but the thirth and fourth are wrong. Also, not reliable.
As noted by single MD5, StockOverflow is not hex and bombaydigital is uppercase, so both functions aren’t giving me the expected output.

The right solution

This leaves us with the one from twmacinta, clearly it’s working, but in code, I needed 779 lines (including comment)
But it’s not really worth if it can be done in nearly 10 lines of code.

JAVA HEX MD5

public String MD5(String md5) {
   try {
        java.security.MessageDigest md = java.security.MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");
        byte[] array = md.digest(md5.getBytes());
        StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
        for (int i = 0; i < array.length; ++i) {
          sb.append(Integer.toHexString((array[i] & 0xFF) | 0x100).substring(1,3));
       }
        return sb.toString();
    } catch (java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException e) {
    }
    return null;
}

So don’t just copy/paste everything you find by using google. Other sites (just like me) can be wrong, yes, we are also just people.

I finally worked at the website and here we are!

A month ago my laptop HDD broke, I couldn’t boot anymore. All my work from school was on it so I really thought I was screwed big time.
After a few hours hard disk checking it was only at 2%, not really good …
So I attached the broken HDD to my PC, and I could backup the second (data) partition, backing up the first (win7) partition was a bit worse. But I managed to recover some. Bought a new HDD and after a day I was up again.

But I was still worried about my work/projects for school and knew SVN was a good solution.
Thats why I installed Redmine and Subversion, found respectively at code.m2tec.be and svn.m2tec.be.
It probably needs some more tweaking, but it’s working.
It will become the main spot for my projects I’m working on, most private but also some public project.

This said, what can you guys expect finding here:
- programming solutions about things that are very hard to find.
- programming solutions of things found everywhere wrong (a good example will follow soon)
- (server/)software installation issues and its solutions
- a bit personal stuff
- …

Tom Peeters and Bram van den Bosch are both co-owners of the website and will probably also post some stuff here.
They will also use the SVN so I guess there will be some nice projects on the server, as they are both student software-developers.