Stefan Helander

Should I use hotmail / gmail / yahoo etc for my business email?

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When you are starting your new business you will need an email address. As a small, startup company it can be tempting to go for the quick, cheap and easy solutions. Is it a good idea to use one of the free email services like hotmail, gmail, yahoo etc as your company email?

My answer is no. I normally don’t recommend it for several reasons. The free services are great for private use, but not for business.

  • Buying your own domain name is cheap.
  • Your own domain name will also market your business name, making it easier for your clients to remember you.
  • It gives you a more trustworthy appearance towards your clients, when you are not building your business on a free service, sharing the domain name with thousands of others.
  • Hotmail, for example, has very “trigger happy” spam filters which means you will most certainly find legitimate emails from a new sender in the spam folder along with real spam emails. You have to tell Hotmail that this was not a spam to “teach” it not to put emails from this sender again in the spam folder. To make sure you don’t miss important business emails you will have to check your spam folders on an hourly basis.

I had a client who lost several assignments because of legitimite client requests ending up in the spam folder at Hotmail. When the emails was found in the Hotmail spam folder, the assignments had already gone to competitors.

We switched the client over to using a domain name of their own, hosted at a hosting company targeting businesses, with spam filters that were a bit more allowing. Meaning, sometimes a spam would end up in the inbox but legitimite emails never ended up in the spam folder.

The client was very used to the Hotmail interface, so we just connected the new email account with their own domain name email account, at the new hosting provider, throught IMAP to the Hotmail account.

This way they could continue to work in the Hotmail (or Outlook OWA) interface with their new email account under their own domain name. So they now just used Hotmail as their “email program” because they were used to it.

When replying to emails sent to their own domain name, the own domain name email account was automatically used for the reply. Only when writing a new email they have to select the account with their own domain name (otherwise, by default, the new email is sent from the Hotmail account).

 

Stefan Helander

Joomla! 1.5 create new admin user via MySQL and phpMyAdmin

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If you need to gain administrator access to a Joomla! 1.5 website where the admin password is not known (forgotten or the original admin is no longer available) you can resolve the situation by adding a new administrator user through MySQL.

For this, obviously, you need to now the database credentials. This is how you do it using MySQL and phpMyAdmin. Click on the images below to see them enlarged.

  1. Log in to phpMyAdmin using the credentials for the Joomla! database
  2. Go to the table jos_users and go to the last record. If your last user id is less than 1000 you can use the values in this example. Otherwise you have to adapt it to a user id larger than your last user id (if you have less than 1000 users in your Joomla! database user id 1000 will be fine).
  3. Insert a new record into the jos_users table:
    Joomla! 1.5 create new admin user via MySQL and phpMyAdmin step 1

    Joomla! 1.5 create new admin user via MySQL and phpMyAdmin step 1

    id = 1000
    name = A new administrator
    username = admin2
    email = admin2@example.com (or perhaps your own email address ;))
    password = d2064d358136996bd22421584a7cb33e:trd7TvKHx6dMeoMmBVxYmg0vuXEA4199
    usertype = Super Administrator
    block = 0
    sendEmail = 1
    gid = 25

    Then click on Run to save the entry

  4. Go to the table jos_core_acl_aro and insert a new record:
    Joomla! 1.5 create new admin user via MySQL and phpMyAdmin step 2

    Joomla! 1.5 create new admin user via MySQL and phpMyAdmin step 2

    id = 1000
    section_value = users
    value = 1000
    order_value = 0
    name = Administrator
    hidden = 0

    Then click on Run to save the entry

  5. Go to the table jos_core_acl_groups_aro_map and insert a new record:
    Joomla! 1.5 create new admin user via MySQL and phpMyAdmin step 3

    Joomla! 1.5 create new admin user via MySQL and phpMyAdmin step 3

    group_id = 25
    section_value = (empty)
    aro_id = 1000

    Then click on Run to save the entry

  6. Now go to the backend of your site (i.e /administrator) and log in with the username “admin2” and the password “secret” (whithout “”)
  7. Go to the user section and immediately change the password of admin2 user since “secret” is a very insecure password
Stefan Helander

Joomla! Component skeleton or framework

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I was going to develop a Joomla! Component for a client and started to read the documentation on how to build a Joomla! Component. I searched online for a skeleton or framework so I didn’t have to program that from scratch. Googeling it didn’t show up any really good results.

Until I realized there are actually services for this. Component Creator is one of them. Through a web interface you can specify the details for your component and you can download a ZIP-file which is installable for Joomla! to start bulding upon.

However, documentation is something not really existing for Component Creator. Instead there are community forums and some video tutorials. I was searching the forums for a specific matter and it turned out that the same question had been asked several times by other users. The reply from the Component Creator staff was that you will get the answer to that question by buying the Premium service. So instead of documenting an answer to a common question they want each client to contact the support team to get the answer, probably in order to sell more Premium subscriptions. A bit odd to me. The free service is so limited anyway so without the Premium subscription you quickly run into it’s limitations, so they will sell them anyway.

You should also be aware that Jensen Technologies who is behind Component Creator also is a consulting business offering development of Joomla! components. So your supplier will also be kind of your competitor. I am not saying they will go and steal your business or clients but it is not always a healthy thing when your supplier is also your competitor. Their in house developers will naturally always have the best support compared to their clients.  If it was me, I would have split it into two different companies.

Anyway, the Component Creator is a powerful and helpful tool when starting a new component project for Joomla!.

The video tutorials can be found here:

There is also a webinar recorded on Youtube here:

Below is a demonstration of building a component in 30 minutes using Component Creator by Søren Beck Jensen (2015).

Stefan Helander

How to keep WordPress widgets when switching themes

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When you switch from one theme to another in WordPress you will discover that all widgets you had is gone. Is there a way to keep the widgets when switching themes?

Short answer is – no. The widgets are set specifically for the theme.

But it is often quite simple to resolve the situation. After you switch theme, go to Appearance -> Widgets and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Here you will find Inactive widgets. You can simply pull them back into your new theme’s widget position and get them back where you want them.

WordPress widgets

WordPress widgets

However, if the widgets you were using was part of the theme you switched from, they will not be available when using the new theme so in that case you need to find an alternative plugin or widget.

Stefan Helander

Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities – what to do?

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Meltdown and Spectre are two vulnerabilities present in hardware making it potentially possible for programs to steal information, like passwords etc.

Meltdown affects only Intel processors while Spectre, which is more complex, also partly affects AMD and ARM based processors.

It is not yet known if these vulnerabilities has been exploited by anone. It can affect personal computers, servers, tablets and mobile phones, i.e. more or less any device containing a processor.

More information on: https://spectreattack.com/

What can you do?

  • Check your operating system for updates the upcoming weeks (this is normal good security practice, but make sure you do it frequently)
  • Install and update your virus protection. Even if the antivirus program can’t protect you from the attack it might be able to inform you that your device has got malicious code onboard

You can find security bulletins, security advisorys, faq:s etc for your operating system here: https://meltdownattack.com/#faq-advisory

Stefan Helander

Asterisk no sound from client

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I was running an Asterisk server behind NAT without any problems at one location. Due to reoargnization it was moved to a new location and placed behind a pfsense firewall. After a while users reported increasing problems with no sound from the clients.

It turned out running a SIP server behind a pfsense can be problematic. When moving to the SIP server to a white IP-adress (no NAT), protecting it using iptables firewall on the SIP-server, all problems disappeared.

It should be noted that the pfsense firewall was not running the latest version of pfsense so it could be caused by a problem solved in later versions of pfsense. However, for different reasons it was not possible to upgrade pfsense so the solution was to move the SIP-server from behind pfsense.

Stefan Helander

How to vertically center text in a div

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This is a neat way of centering text in a div. Live demo here.

 

<html>
<head>
 <title>Vertical text center demo</title>
</head>
<body>
<style>
.textbox {
 height: 200px;
 width: 300px;
 text-align: center;
 font-size: 14px;
 font-weight: bold;
 background-color: blue;
}
.textbox p {
 height: 100%;
 display: flex; /* vertically center text */
 justify-content: center;
 align-content: center;
 flex-direction: column;
 margin: 0 50px;
 color: white;
}
</style>
<h1>Vertical text center demo</h1>
<div class="textbox">
 <p>This text is vertically centered in the box</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Stefan Helander

Unable to mount NTFS filesystem due to hibernation

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I had retrieved a harddisk out of a broken laptop containing Windows 10 in order to retrieve some files from it. The harddisk had been removed from the broken laptop and then installed in a HDD enclosure with USB connection. When I connected it to a Windows computer I could browse the Users folder but clicking on a user’s folder displayed a message that I didn’t have permissions to open it unless I continued as administrator. After the progress bar had went to 100%, I still couldn’t access the folder.

Instead I connected it to a Linux/Ubuntu computer and now the message “The NTFS partition is in an unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation or fast restarting), or mount the volume read-only with the `ro` mount option.” was displayed when connected. The original laptop had been in a hibernate state when it broke which locks the filesystem.

It turned out that the easiest solution was to connect the USB harddrive to a laptop and press F10 to select boot device during boot up (the key might be different depending on brand, on my Samsing it was F10). I selected the USB harddisk and it booted after fixing the disk automatically. I was actually a bit hesitant to do this because I know from earlier Windows version that it usually was a hopeless task to boot on a harddisk that had been moved from one host computer to another. In Windows 10 it looks like they have fixed this.

I could log in to Windows as the original user and retrieve the files. After shutting it down in a controlled manner, it was also possible to mount the disk in Linux/Ubuntu..

Stefan Helander

Ispconfig3 unable to store client on DNS and email domain records

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After upgrading from Ispconfig 3.0 to 3.1 odd things started to happen. For example, when saving a DNS secondary zone it would not store the client selected. Same thing when saving an email domian, client info and spam filter setting just would save.

The solution turned out to be simple. Gentlemen – clear your cookies and login again! Problem solved.

Stefan Helander

High load on CPU and disk I/O every hour (Apache, MySQL and mod_pagespeed on Ubuntu)

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On one of my Ubuntu servers I noticed a significant peak in CPU load (load average, LA) and disk I/O about every hour. At first, I suspected that MySQL was the cause of this, doing some houeskeeping or garbage cleaning.

However, it turned out it was caused by the Apache module mod_pagespeed. The high load occuered when pagespeed was cleaning out it’s cache.

The solution was to locate the cache on tmpfs instead. This was done by editing the file /etc/apache2/mods-available/pagespeed.conf and change the location of the cache by the line (/run is located on tmpfs which is RAM memory):

ModPagespeedFileCachePath "/run/cache/mod_pagespeed/"

Then restart Apache by:

service apache2 restart