Stefan Helander

Windows won’t boot and you need the data on the harddisk?

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There is a nice solution to this little problem – called Active@ boot disk LiveCD. Download it as an ISO image (on another working computer of course), burn it to a CD and boot from the CD on your malfunctioning computer. The LiveCD is filled with utilities for you to get your valuable data off your crashed computer.

Even though there is a working free download I would encourage everyone that finds it valuable to pay the license so those guys at LiveCD can continue their good work on this product.

Stefan Helander

Bastard Operator From Hell

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Any BOFHs out there recognizing themselves? 🙂

(Yes, I know, this is not the original BOFH, but this guy is acting like a BOFH.)

Stefan Helander

All icons on the desktop has Microsoft Internet Explorer icon

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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.

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Stefan Helander

FreeBSD 6.3 end-of-life January 31, 2010

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FreeBSDThe FreeBSD 6.3-Release is heading towards it’s End-Of-Life on January 31, 2010. This means the release is no longer supported and maintained by the FreeBSD security team. Users are strongly recommended to upgrade.

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.

Stefan Helander

New year – and a little year 2010 bug

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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.

Stefan Helander

FTP not working in passive mode – proftpd, iptables and ISPconfig

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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.

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Stefan Helander

Linksys WRT54GL and inbound VPN (PPTP) forwarding

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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.

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Stefan Helander

Homemade steam rocket on ice

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How to have some fun with technology!

Stefan Helander

Joomla! templates looking strange in MSIE8

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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.

Stefan Helander

How to move a osCommerce site

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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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