Don’t forget to run make test!
During my install of PHP5 on FreeBSD…
Build complete.
Don’t forget to run ‘make test’.amber# make test
make: don’t know how to make test. Stop
It made me laugh anyway.
Archive for Sysadmin
Setting up a FreeBSD socks proxy server for use with mIRC
I’m getting fed up with my current IRC BNC software. At the moment I’m using psyBNC, which means I have to connect to it like you would an IRC server, then issue commands to that to tell it to connect to the IRC server of your choice.
I no longer need the features of psyBNC and decided that there must be a better way.
At first I started looking at other, more basic BNC software, but then worked out that they work in very much the same way as psyBNC in the fact that you have to first connect to it, then tell it where to connect to.
So I thought… What about a socks5 proxy?
Tracking an IP address
In my job I have to manage lots of machines all over the place. Many of them are on windows.
I often find tracking IP addresses to be a difficult task if they do not have a static IP address.
So what can be done to keep track of an IP address?
How to extract photos from an exe
I wasn’t going to write about this, but I liked the solution (application) so much I had to shout about it.
I was provided with a 30 day cd preview slideshow of wedding photos, and was asked very kindly to attempt to extract the photos from it so they could be viewed beyond the trial period.
Print dialog does not appear in Outlook Express or Internet Explorer
Today I get a call.
Outlook Express won’t print.
I log in and take a look. Everything seems normal, and normal documents appear to print.
However, when I click the print button or go to File > Print nothing happens. Strange.
They are running Windows XP Professional SP2, with IE6.
suPHP and .phps PHP code highlighting support
Today a user on one of my web servers asked me why .phps files would only download and not show the highlighted PHP code as expected.
This is usually done by adding the following to your “httpd.conf”…
AddType ‘application/x-httpd-php-source’ .phps
We use the cPanel web hosting control panel and to improve security cPanel recommend using suPHP, which allows PHP scripts to run as a user rather than “nobody”.
This means that adding the above line to “httpd.conf” does not work with suPHP.
So what can be done?
longip script
I wanted to create a script that would convert a normal IP address to a long IP, just like mIRC Script’s $longip alias.
$longip(address)
Converts an IP address into a long value and vice-versa.
$longip(158.152.50.239) returns 2660774639
$longip(2660774639) returns 158.152.50.239
What I was originally trying to do was increase an IP by 1, but due to the octets only allowing up to 255, this became increasingly difficult to do.
What I decided to do in the end was convert the IP to a “longip” then increase it by 1, then convert the IP BACK to normal IP.
This required a way to convert an IP to and from longIP, I was told it could be done purely using shell script, here’s what I did…
What is a hacker?
Not so long ago I was asked to answer some questions for a friend of a friend who was writing a dissertation about the “hacking and warez scene” (which I have not been heavily involved in since I turned 18).
As I had known him for a long time, I felt obliged to help out, plus I was now interested in the questions that would be asked.
Based on what had been said I knew they were going to be questions on defining what a hacker is and what a hacker does, something i’ve been interested in defining for quite some time.
Here’s what I said…
Friendly URLs (revisited)
Turn dynamic URLs into friendly URLs
I’m sure we’re all familiar with URLs that look like this:
http://www.example.com/?nav=page
These type of URLs aren’t particularly “friendly”, they are known as dynamic URLs. As a rule of thumb search engines such as Google don’t like them as much as “static URLs”.
However, Google has recently released an article on this very subject entitled Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs, I recommend you give it a read so you fully understand what we’re talking about.
Firefox “Always On Top” on Windows XP
When watching long streaming online videos I often watch them while I do other things, perhaps even browse other websites. I need something to keep firefox on top!
The problem is the moment that I use another application the focus is taken away from the Firefox window and it goes into the background. This is no good as I can no longer see the video.
I decided to investigate a solution that could keep the Mozilla Firefox window “Always on Top”…