March 1st, 2010

Open BSD

I don’t often seem to find the time to play around with some of the various UNIX variants out there. Anyway when a customers VPN network appliance died on me today I went to investigate.

It was supplied by a company who are no longer in business so I was pretty much on my own.

After attaching a monitor and keyboard and watching it boot I discovered it was booting OpenBSD 3.8

I didn’t know the root password and this appliance had lost all tcp/ip connectivity. So I googled and found http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/reset-forgotten-openbsd-root-password.html

This post worked like a charm for me and I had reset the root password within a few minutes.

No time to find out why this appliance cannot communicate over tcp/ip currently.


By Matt in Systems  .::. (Add your comment)

February 12th, 2010

WDS

Been configuring Netgear wireless routers with WDS settings to extend the range of the wireless signal in a home network environment. All worked great though I was using two DG834G routers and they need to be v3 or higher.


By Matt in Systems  .::. (Add your comment)

November 20th, 2009

Apps for Windows after a clean install.

Raid 0 Fail

My laptop’s RAID0 array failed the other day resulting in a new hdd installation and a complete re-install of the operating system.

I had backups of my work, my personal files etc however I had to go through the hassle of re-installing all my applications.

As a side note – what a poor config choice RAID0 turned out to be. Unfortunately this was the way the laptop arrived from the factory. In my opinion it doubles the chances of a catastrophic disk failure as either disk going down will render the raid drive unusable. I chose to configure RAID1 when I rebuilt.

It’s always best to have a recent backup to restore from, but when you need to install all your applications again it helps to have a check list as there is just so many to remember.

So in no particular order here are most of them:

  • Notepad++
  • mIRC
  • Adobe Reader / Shockwave / Flash
  • Canon Digital Photo Software
  • SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
  • Visual Studio Express Edition
  • SyncToy 2.1
  • Windows Live Messenger
  • AVG Antivirus / Microsoft Security Essentials
  • Google Chrome
  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Mozilla Thunderbird
  • 7Zip
  • Gimp
  • Blender
  • VLC
  • nMap – needs WinPcap
  • Wireshark
  • Microsoft Network Monitor
  • Microsoft WinDbg
  • Dia
  • Inkscape
  • FreeMind
  • VNC Server / Viewer
  • Nokia Software
  • Java
  • Google Earth
  • SysInternals Suite
  • Python
  • Azureus / Vuze
  • Daemon Tools Lite
  • FileZilla
  • ImgBurn
  • Audacity
  • Amaya
  • Visual Studio 2008 Shell
  • SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
  • Windows Powershell 2.0
  • CDex (ripper)
  • PuTTY
  • UltraVNC
  • ImageMagick
  • Skype
  • DiscJuggler (demo)

By Matt in General  .::. (Add your comment)

November 2nd, 2009

PHPLayersMenu 3.2.0

PHPLayersMenu 3.2.0 – this script provides a nice clean hierarchical web menu for a website – it’s multip platform and browser and is very configurable.

It’s available here: http://phplayersmenu.sourceforge.net/

I’ve just been getting this well known php script to work under Windows with PHP running under IIS.

After following the docs and making sure I set $myDirPath = ‘D:\\Websites\\sitename.co.uk\\phplayersmenu-3.2.0\\’;
$myWwwPath = ‘/phplayersmenu-3.2.0/’;

I was nearly there except I was getting a template error.

After a little searching I found the solution in \lib\layersmenu.inc.php

There is some code in there that sets various default paths and it needed changing to take account of the windows notation for the physical file paths.

/*
 $this->dirroot = ‘./’;
 $this->libjsdir = ‘./libjs/’;
 $this->imgdir = ‘./menuimages/’;
 $this->imgwww = ‘menuimages/’;
 $this->icondir = ‘./menuicons/’;
 $this->iconwww = ‘menuicons/’;
 $this->tpldir = ‘./templates/’;
*/

/* BECAME THIS */

$winroot = ‘D:\\Websites\\manick.co.uk\\phplayersmenu-3.2.0\\’;
$winWwwPath = ‘/phplayersmenu-3.2.0/’;
 $this->dirroot = $winroot;
 $this->libjsdir = $winroot.’libjs\\’;
 $this->imgdir = $winroot.’menuimages\\’;
 $this->imgwww = $winWwwPath.’menuimages/’;
 $this->icondir = $winroot.’menuicons\\’;
 $this->iconwww = $winWwwPath.’menuicons/’;
 $this->tpldir = $winroot.’templates\\’;

After that I was good to go and the menu system now works in any folder on the webserver not just the folder I installed the script.


By Matt in web  .::. (Add your comment)

October 5th, 2009

DOCTYPE craziness with IE8

I use xhtml docs to store content for my site – it’s a custom built cms written in php.

So, my content files all use a template that looks like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.manick.co.uk/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd“>

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>

<head>
</head>

<body>
</body>

</html>

Anyway, I’ve noticed that IE8 fails to show these files, though FF has no issue. Very annoying. It would show an error like this:

The XML page cannot be displayed

Cannot view XML input using style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

System error: -2146697204. Error processing resource ‘http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd’.

 

 

Anyway I finally decided to research the problem and find out what is wrong…

I found a very relevant blog post about DTDs here:

http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic

It seems that w3 suffer from excessive traffic when these DTD documents are repetitively called for over the Internet resulting in a kind of DOS attack.

There seems to be a great deal of ongoing debate regarding this issue – as I was looking for a quick fix I decided to host the relevant DTDs on my own server.

I was happy to do this as these XHTML files are not served directly to web browsers but are processed by PHP on my webserver.

The resulting document that is returned to the webrowser can continue to list the www.w3.org DTD document.

I’m guessing that IE8 shouldn’t be attempting to load these documents from w3.org when I try to view my xml files that contain the xhtml.

Also it appears that the w3.org have now gone so far as to block browsers requesting the DTD based on the User-Agent string of the HTTP request.

I gleaned this info from: http://www.outofcontrol.ca/2009/02/20/w3org-dtdxhtml1-strictdtd-blocks-windows-ie-users/

It seems odd to me that we are still struggling with this and it’s now nearly 2010.


By Matt in Systems, web  .::. (Add your comment)

September 18th, 2009

PHPExcel

Decided to find out if there were any free libraries that would allow you to create Excel files from scratch. Idea being that you can call this from PHP and create a spreadsheet from a website. Not a new idea but anyway. Found PHPExcel v1.7.0 and got it installed and running very quickly. Great piece of work. I will likely use it at some point in some project or other. Oh, it writes Excel 2007 format too.


By Matt in Systems, web  .::. (Add your comment)

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