Bastard Operator From Hell
Any BOFHs out there recognizing themselves? 🙂
(Yes, I know, this is not the original BOFH, but this guy is acting like a BOFH.)
All icons on the desktop has Microsoft Internet Explorer icon
There is a practical joke being spread to Windows Vista users trying to fool them to associate .lnk (shortcuts) files with Microsoft Internet Explorer (MS IE). The so called joke in this is that it is very easy to do, but almost impossble to undo of you are not a skilled computer technician. This is because there is no possibility for the user to “unassociate” a file extension once it has been associated.
FreeBSD 6.3 end-of-life January 31, 2010
Conservative users can upgrade to FreeBSD 6.4-Release (EoL November 30, 2010) or FreeBSD 7.1 (EoL January 31, 2011) which both are extended life releases. Others should upgrade to FreeBSD 7.2-Release or 8.0-Release.
For more information, see FreeBSD.org.
New year – and a little year 2010 bug
The 200x ended and we went into 2010. So we got ourselves a little 2010 bug. It was in the spam filtering software Spamassassin. Or to be more precise in it’s rulesets.
The problem was actually discovered and fixed months ago but someone forgot to include it in the rulesets for Spamassassin 3.2.x. No hard feelings about that. Those guys are doing a great job and shit do happen. It was fixed in a couple of hours on January 1, 2010.
The problem was that all incoming mail filtered by Spamassassin was flagged with FH_PAST_DATE_20XX and given an extra +3.4 spam score which results in false positives.
Those that were running sa-update by cron had this automatically fixed as the updated rules were on the servers around noon on January 1, 2010. Those not running sa-update by cron… still have problems unless they have run sa-update manually. Saying that, running sa-update by cron might be a good idea to keep your Spamassassin rules updated 🙂 A script for doing so and getting a mail with the result can be found here.
Some FreeBSD users reported that sa-update was not able to pull down the updated rules. A manual workaround and links to details around the problem is found here.
FTP not working in passive mode – proftpd, iptables and ISPconfig
If you are using proftpd FTP server together with iptables firewall, which is the case if you for example are using ISPconfig, you will probably have problems using FTP against your server in passive mode. The problem is that the iptables firewall will not allow the incoming connections in passive mode.
The solution is to configure proftpd to use a small, defined range of incoming ports and open iptables for this range.
Linksys WRT54GL and inbound VPN (PPTP) forwarding
Before you read this entire post – this was posted after I just installed the router and configured it for VPN (PPTP) pass through. A week or so later, when I was abroad and needed my VPN the most (of course), it had stopped working. To make a long story short – my router is now running the Tomato firmware. So unless you like banging your head in a buggy firmware from Linksys, read my post about installing Tomato instead.
Scenario: You are using a Linksys WRT54GL broadband router to connect your LAN to the Internet. On your Internal LAN you have a computer that can handle inbound VPN connections (PPTP). This can be a Windows XP or Windows Server of some kind.
To make this work you must configure your broadband router to forward the inbound VPN (PPTP) connections to your PC. This is normally simple but some people (including me) ran into some problems trying to do this on a Linksys WRT54GL router.
Homemade steam rocket on ice
How to have some fun with technology!
Joomla! templates looking strange in MSIE8
Some Joomla! templates looks nice in all browsers except Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8). One easy solution is to add the following line to the <head> section of the index.php for the template in question: <head>
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7"/>
Be careful to check that your site works as expected after applying this solution.
How to move a osCommerce site
When you move an osCommerce installation from one webserver to another it often isn’t possible to just move it and update your DNS-names, unless the conditions, like paths and database users etc are exactly the same. This is a step by step guide how to do it, and if you find something that I didn’t catch, please let me know (by the Contact in the menu).
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Remove control characters (^M) by search and replace in vi
| If you edit a text file in a UNIX or Linux environment that has it’s origin in the DOS or Windows world, you will see that every line ends with the control character ^M. The reason is that the UNIX or Linux world only use one control character to mark an end of line and in the DOS or Windows world this is done by two control characters.
The control characters will be automatically converted if you use ASCII mode when transferring the file by FTP between the UNIX or Linux world and the DOS or Windows world. However, if you end up with a text file in the UNIX or Linux environment that for some reason didn’t get its end of line control characters converted, you will see that every line ends with a ^M. Those ^Ms can easily be stripped away by using the search-and-replace function in the vi editor. This requires that you have a basic knowledge on how to edit files in vi. To search and replace the ^M you use the search and replace command %s. The format for this command is: (press ESC key once) :%s/TEXT/REPLACE/g where all occurences of the TEXT will be replaced by the word REPLACE. Now we want to replace a control character, so instead of TEXT we should enter ^M. If we just type the ^ character and then the M character on our keyboard, the search and replace function will not match the ^M seen in our text file. This is because they are control characters, i.e. control-M (press and hold the CTRL-key while pressing M). If we try to just press CTRL-M after the :%s/ you will get an error message. This is because the CTRL-M is the same as pressing the Enter key. To tell vi not to interpret the CTRL-M you need to escape it. This is done by pressing and holding CTRL in the same time as the V-character once before pressing CTRL-M. In the example below, pressing and holding CTRL while pressing the V-character is shown as a ^V and pressing and holding the the CTRL while pressing the M-character is shown as a ^M. So to search and replace all ^M in the entire file in vi you should do: (press ESC key once) :%s/^V^M//g |