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Archive for the ‘Tech Tips and Howtos’ Category

MS Outlook XP and earlier

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

These all have something insane in common, they can only open pst files that are 2GB or less, but they’ll write those files until well over that limit. So the next time Outlook opens it just sort of spazzes out.

Fun yes?

There’s a tool to truncate the file, from MicroSoft, but it doesn’t seem to follow any sane pattern or allow you any kind of selectivity.

Definitely fun. The only options from here are to change mail clients (I suggest Thunderbird) or upgrade to a later version of Outlook. I don’t suggest that because then you’ll still be using Outlook.

Some speedup stuff for FireFox in Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04)

Saturday, September 13th, 2008

If I could get to the Ubuntu Forums right now I’d link to the post that had these instructions. Maybe later.

Anyway, it had me set these to true in about:config

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining

Then this was set to 30:
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Note that this value is controversial since it can eat more bandwidth at once from a server. The default is 4, feel free to use that or any other low number you want.

Then it had me create this key:
nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Which was an integer value, set to 0.

Previously I already disabled ipv6 with this key:
network.dns.disableIPv6 set to true.

Lastly I used a modification of this great tip from tombuntu:
Added tmpfs /fftmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,size=100m,mode=1777 0 0 to /etc/fstab
Make sure you adjust the size to fit your needs. By default you only really need 50MB, or 50m, but I figured some padding is good. You can leave the size option off and it’ll default to half your RAM, but that’s a maximum number, not what it’ll always use.
Next I mounted that with sudo mount -a, after making /fftmp, then added this key to Firefox:
browser.cache.disk.parent_directory which was a string equal to /fftmp.

The result? So far a really snappy Firefox.

IE 7 crash when trying to open attachments from Hotmail

Saturday, September 13th, 2008

How specific is that huh? In all honesty it could have done it with any non-embedded documents for all I know, I didn’t check. The full story is the client, using Vista, got this problem yesterday along with not being able to open Word documents. You would try to open one and it would say the document was unavailable.

The fix? Clean out the temp files. I use CCleaner for this, since it’s very thorough. Why this fixed it, I really don’t know. There wasn’t anything else obviously wrong, like malware or viruses, so I can only assume something got corrupted somehow.

Good Malware Tool

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

This seems to be a great malware scanner. Use it, if you’re a sucker and use Windows.

Bizarre failure modes- A cable modem story

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Edit: Scratch all of my dumb convoluted theories kids. Turns out, and I told him to check on this a month ago, they shut his account down due to copyright infringement, specifically downloading old episodes of Heroes. The best part is that only one technician, out of something like 6, actually bothered looking at his account and finding the issue.

Sometimes a device will fail in a way that is, to put it gently, retarded. Radiator thermostats stick closed, a dhcp device will issue an immediate expiration of leases just as it dies, a sensor will report that everything is just fine, and all that sort of thing.

This is about a cable modem.

The person who has tolerated me the longest, my friend Art, has been having internet issues. Specifically he can’t connect to it. He would get issued an address in a 172 range, which is a private subnet, which is a problem since he connects directly to a cable modem and should be receiving a publicly routed real boy ip address. In Windows it would also be assigned a gateway in the 172 range.

Did I mention he lives several states away, so I had to handle this all by phone? Yeah, good times.

So we plunk away at it, do a repair install, try a different NIC, and so on. I remember he has a router so I walk him through setting it up, but I’m pretty sure he goofed and plugged the cable modem into one of the 4 internal ports, a fact that would set my diagnosis back a ways.

Cox said everything looks fine (a foul lie), and said he should power off his modem for 10 minutes and try again. Try not to fall for this people, make them wait it out with you if they insist on such a time. There’s no real difference between 10 seconds and 10 minutes, aside from some heat maybe.

He doesn’t have another computer and knows only technophobes apparently, so trying another computer is out of the question. So I convince him to download Ubuntu and burn a livecd of that. We boot up and…. a 172 address greets us. We look in resolv.conf, however, and guess what? There’s Cox information in there. A 24. gateway and a Cox search domain.

So we hook the router up again, double checking the connections this time, and lo, he has a real (local) ip and can hit the router’s configuration page. Meanwhile it’s acquired the same bogus info he was getting, so here’s my theory.

The modem broke, and can no longer obtain an ip, but is set to do some weird fallback behavior and is assigning an ip based on that, plus a default gateway that it’s set to search for initially, or something very much like that.

He’s currently out getting another modem, so we shall see.

PGP Encryption for a PHP generated email

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

That took some real doing. If you have the option, just use PECL extensions. If you don’t, prepare to sit around and try a bunch of things out.

I found several scripts that claimed to be the solution to this issue, but none of them wanted to work. Finally I pieced together something like this-

$commandline = “gpg –homedir /var/www/vhosts/host/httpdocs/gpgtests/gnupg –keyring  /var/www/vhosts/host/httpdocs/gpgtests/gnupg/keyring1 -a –always-trust –batch –no-secmem-warning -e -r ‘Fargo Holiday’  -o $outfile $infile”;

system($commandline, $result);

Which still didn’t seem to work, because the line, cribbed from one of the scripts, to check the result before emailing wasn’t firing. It was looking for a $result of 0, and I was getting 2. Turns out, for this case anyway, 2 works just fine.

Also, PGP is awesome, and I feel bad for having mostly ignored it until now.

Crazy assed Hamachi

Saturday, January 19th, 2008

If you weren’t so handy you’d be worthless. I swear though, if I ever find a good alternative, it’s over.

Anyway, on to the meat of this post. I had trouble getting Hamachi to run on my linux box. Wouldn’t go, wouldn’t error, wouldn’t anything.

Finally I found this post, and lo, it solved the whole shootin’ match of issues. I can’t even conceive of why.  For those that just want the answer, I installed the upx-ucl-beta from Synaptic, went into /usr/bin and ran upx -d hamachi .

This “unpacks” the binary. If you can tell me what that means, feel free.

com port in use and a receipt printer; a tale of woe

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

So, imagine you’re me. Only better looking and richer, since you’re imagining it all anyway you may as well be happier.

Anyway. You get this POS station all setup and ready to go, everything tested except the receipt printer because, duh, it’s been in use. Big deal, what could happen?

Jesus fucking christ. I plug everything in, and it won’t print. Not even when I use a raw text driver. So, I muck about for an hour or so. Cables are swapped, powers are cycled, ad nauseum. Finally I become convinced the com port has gone splodey or something, so I hope Hyperterminal and just see if I can hit anything on com1. It gives an access denied error.

“What the hell ass?” I think, suavely.

So I remove all the backwards Epson drivers from the Subway site, reboot, and try again. Now I get a message that another program is using the device. Being Windows there’s just no damned way to figure out what is using this port, or at least no way I could find with my brain thinking of nothing more than sleep.

I diddle, I spelunk, I delve, I wanted to commit suicide with the TurboChef. Finally it stumbles into my beaten brain that the touchscreen was initially connected to the com port. Very interesting. So I go through the Elo setup, specifying usb only and… dammit, same damned problem.

In one of those moments where you desperately don’t want to come back, and the brain overloads itself, sacrificing joyous memories and 10 years of non-diaper wearing old age, I was struck with the idea of deleting the com port, then re-configuring the driver.

Stunned as anyone, it worked.

The moral of the story? Kill at least one random stranger, on the off chance he or she may have been involved with developing a shitty driver.

Lifebook S6210 Power Jack

Sunday, December 23rd, 2007

Now, the power jack is an Achilles heel for a lot of laptops/notebooks, but this one takes the cake. The jack is totally unsupported aside from the the posts on the board, which while crappy is also normal, but for the connection it has a springy lump at that top, causing the insert to cantilever the whole thing a little, especially when stressed at all, and pop the negative terminal post, which is the one towards the back.

It’s also a pain to get apart, but I found this great writeup on doing it. The model is different, but it’s 90%+ the same.

Retards, retards everywhere!

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

So. Yeah. Let’s make this brief, ok?

If you get an email, say with an attachment called invoice.doc, you will know if it’s from someone, or someplace, that you are familiar with.

Unless you’re exceptionally retarded.

A couple of quick points. Quotes are from the linked article.

“400 individuals at financial institutions, with the e-mail addressed specifically to that individual and purporting to be a complaint from the U.S. Department of Justice.”

And? If an email has an attachment that you didn’t request, at this point you should know it’s junk. Beyond that, the DOJ or BBB isn’t going to email you, douchebag, despite your inflated sense of self importance.

” The Trojan horse that gets installed on a computer allows an attacker to have remote access to the machine”

So what? This is what all of those back orifice trojans do, and they’ve been around a VERY long time. If a machine is behind a router, this is a much more difficult proposition. A firewall of any merit and the chances of a machine being controlled remotely are even lower. Assuming someone did make a trojan or virus capable of something similar to, say, Hamachi, it’s still an email from someone you don’t know with an attachment.

“The attack spoofing the Justice Department contained an executable program within a zipped file with the extension .scr, typically used by screen savers.”

Yes, the DOJ sent you a screen saver. Congratulations.

“Such attacks are both harder to detect than mass phishing attacks, and more likely to be acted on given the fact they are customized to their recipients, including things such as their name and official title.”

No, not my name and title!

“One of the big reasons behind the increase is the availability of toolkits that enable criminals to essentially have a template for the attacks, wherein they need to fill in only the targeted information.

“A year or two ago you would have to be fairly technically sophisticated in order to create these attacks,” Wood said.”

What? It’s an email attack, you retard. 10 years ago you’d need to be technically sophisticated to spam viruses to the 8 people online who received email.

“Wood added that the rise of social networks like Facebook and professional networks such as Plaxo and LinkedIn are making it easier for attackers to do their homework on potential victims.”

Homework on potential victims? That seals it, this guy doesn’t understand any damned thing. First, it’s all blah blah template blah automated, now you have a personal stalker. The truth is that anyplace your information is visible, it will be scraped by a spam-bot and your name will be added to the hellmass of the universe.

Here’s the real problem- reading comprehension. If you can read a book longer than 200 pages and write an insightful summary, you won’t be taken in by scam email. Unless you’re just hopelessly naive.

Bibles don’t count, by the way, because we all know you just skim over it, and no normal person is going to double check anything you say, because it’s an awful read.

Only once or twice have I had to actually look at an email closely to determine if it’s junk missed by my junk filter(s). Here’s a couple of simple practices for suspicious emails.

Does it have an attachment? Yeah? Screw it then, it’s gone. If it just seems too damned important to not open, forward it to your boss. He makes more than you, let him get a virus by being stupid.

Are there links in the email, to something that looks legitimate? You do realize that text can say anything, but take you somewhere else, right? In most email clients you can hover the cursor over the link text, and the actual target is shown below. Usually you’ll see things like paypal.skrewz.ch which isn’t, I assure you, a paypal associate.

Does the email ask you for personal information? Yeah? WHY WOULD YOU REPLY TO THIS?

Grow up people, the internet should be old hat by now. People like this Wood guy are paid to make you afraid, so you’ll buy more security bullcrap that you don’t really need.