Bohack

Making sure mail is sent properly from a PHP website is a bit difficult when it’s not your server, like shared hosting. You never have access to the mail logs, so you can’t see mail moving. I host several websites on shared hosting and recently found my CMS was not sending emails to me. So I opened a ticket and I concluded it to be a SNAFU.

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When you purchase a Dell server you can purchase the Open Manage software, so they ship you media. OpenManage is the software that installs the maintenance partition and the automated install of the operating system as well as firmware updates. However if you did not get media with your server or want the latest version of software; you might run into a problem if you download the software with Internet Explorer and never read the instructions.

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I had just finished working on a project where I needed to programmatically get a web page and save the HTML to a file. I started toying around with some code I used for parsing XML and totally rewrote the code. I found that I kept getting an error of “Microsoft VBScript runtime error: Invalid procedure call or argument”. I couldn’t understand what was going on. I was passing the parameters correctly to the File System Object, but I kept getting the error. All FSO was doing was creating a file and writing the string out. So I checked the length and then started writing the left(string,number) and found it was a character that was in Unicode. So I wrote a Unicode to Ascii function that is not all that efficient, but it is very effective. The sample code below will get a webpage from Google and save it to a file.

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The key to mastering permissions at the command line in Vista and Windows Server 2008 Server is learning the icacls.exe command. With the introduction of Windows Vista, you can no longer select multiple items like folders and files and apply permissions to a group of objects. The recommended way is to use the command line and the icacls.exe command.

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Recently I found a problem when using Mac OS X and Windows Server 2003 R2 as a file server. The problem exists in the permissions that are applied to user folders. When applying permissions to shares you normally start out with a very restrictive permission structure at the top. As you create the folders you add permissions for users and groups to permit and restrict access for others. This structure of permissions is very common in dealing with corporate shares. We also share the folder with ‘domain users’ only having change or modify access to the entire share. This eliminates people applying their own permissions and locking everyone out including themselves. This is a common task for a network admin in setting up permissions.
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Recently I needed to connect to a Cisco router and didn’t have a serial cable on hand. The Cisco routers just like their switches come supplied with a console port built in. This console port is usually a female RJ-45 in the back of the unit and is labeled console. A lot of other manufacturers also use this method to connect to their equipment; everything from Sun servers to appliance servers.

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Recently I needed to extract a links from a web page; normally I would use some Linux commands ported to windows and get the job done. In the end I needed to format the relative link to a full URL, so I decided to use Excel. However when I imported the web page into excel I found that the URL was embedded in the friendly name of the hyperlink.

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Back in April I attended the Notacon the hacker-art convention up in Cleveland Ohio. The hardware hacking room had a number of little project kits they were giving out to teach people how to solder. These project kits included the chips, resistors, LEDs, serial connector and everything except the solder. They ran labs and the last day they just wanted to get rid of these project kits. So I grabbed a couple that caught my eye. One kit had an Atmel AVR programmable chip, eight LEDs and sported a 9-pin serial connector. The kit is the Mini-POV3 sold by http://www.adafruit.com/ for $17.50, it’s all you need to get started with programmable chips!

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I’ve been using Microsoft’s Virtual PC for the past 7 years, ever since I spoke with a kernel developer at Microsoft and found that they solely use Virtual PC for debug and development. Since then I have used it to build images and teach in the classroom as a learning device. It allows me to teach with what I call a surgical approach, because every lab is perfectly clean every time for every student. However it is all about the footprint when it comes to storage of the Virtual Hard Drives, sometime you need to keep several VHD images around. So over the past few years I have put a collection of tools together that lead to the best compaction method.

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Again I find myself wiring up T1 circuits for a Telco provider that my company is going to use. I also find myself scouring the Internet for color codes for the T1 cable at the “Smart Jack”. The smart jack is where the demarcation point or demarc resides. So what is a demarc and what exactly is the smart jack… The demarc is where the Telco ends their responsibility and yours begins. The Telco needs a way to start your responsibility for wiring and internal maintenance, that is the threshold of the demarc. The smart-jack is a way that the phone company can loop or loopback the signal so that they can remotely check that everything is OK on their side.

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