Posts By: jonny

Compiling Dansguardian with Increased MaxChildren

squid

I have three main proxy servers running Squid, Squidguard and DansGuardian servicing over 1300 desktop computers. The stock DansGuardian code includes a setting to limit the number of potential DansGuardian child processes to the operating system file descriptor limits. I have managed to increase this to 900 but would like to push it further. The setting… Read more »

smbclient: Special Characters and UTF-8

I have a PHP web application that communicates to Windows Shares via the smbclient binary. My problem was that some characters (particularly accented characters such as é ) were not being shown on the PHP page and were even causing lines of output to be omitted. After ensuring the PHP page was outputting UTF8 I… Read more »

CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Evo

coolermaster-hyper-212-evo

I ordered a CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Evo from Amazon for £26.50 to keep my machine a little cooler than the stock heat sink. The two heat sinks are shown below. The CoolerMaster is much bigger and could be a struggle to get in to most cases but I am very happy with the results. It… Read more »

WordPress Bulk Actions with WP-CLI

I manage a WordPress Multi-user environment and needed to bulk add LDAP users (which is already quite easy) and also to bulk create blogs for users – which I couldn’t find an easy method for. I started exploring how I could script the creation of this when I happened upon WP-CLI. yum install git Then… Read more »

RSA Security Console Forgotten Admin Password

RSA Security Console

My colleague forgot the password he used for the admin user account on the RSA Security Console – since it needs to be changed and a previously used password cannot be re-used. We have it installed on a Windows Server 2008 so to create a temporary admin account: Open Command Prompt Change directory to the… Read more »

Media Streaming on Ubuntu with Mediatomb

mediatomb

Install with: sudo apt-get install mediatomb Amend the /etc/mediatomb/config.xml file. I find the  configuration below works well for all the video types I throw at it. Then access the web interface at http://localhost:49152 logging in with mediatomb/mediatomb and add some video directories to be served. <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <config version=”2″ xmlns=”http://mediatomb.cc/config/2″ xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xsi:schemaLocation=”http://mediatomb.cc/config/2 http://mediatomb.cc/config/2.xsd”><!– Read /usr/share/doc/mediatomb-common/README.gz… Read more »

Testing SMTP AUTH PLAIN Over TLS

TLS SMTP connection

To prepare to test a TLS connection to an SMTP server we first need to Base64 encode the Login credentials: perl -MMIME::Base64 -e ‘print encode_base64(“\000LoginID\000password”)’ The result of this is: AExvZ2luSUQAcGFzc3dvcmQ= I tried using the base64 linux command but did not get the same result or a result that would work: echo -n “\000LoginID\000password” |… Read more »

Retrieving folder.jpg thumbnails: PHP Script

When using XBMC we usually use the ‘Files’ menu. The folder icons under ‘Files’ do not show a preview thumbnail unless there is an image in the folder named ‘folder.jpg’. I could manually search for folder images for each movie but decided that would be time-consuming so I put together a wee PHP script –… Read more »

Exim Troubleshooting

We had a bit of difficulty yesterday with LDAP / Active Directory authentication within Exim. Sending mail via SMTP with authentication was timing out and it looked like a TLS error. 2013-10-01 14:39:12 [17013] TLS error on connection from blahblahblah (ehloname) [192.168.1.3]:52031 I=[192.168.6.51]:587 (SSL_accept): error:140760FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_CLIENT_HELLO:unknown protocol We got to the bottom of the problem… Read more »

HaiPai i9389 MTK6589 Android Phone

Android Home Screen

WARNING: I AM NOT RECOMMENDING THIS PHONE, THE SELLER OR ALIEXPRESS I am adding an update to this original post as there have been some developments. I bought two of these phones (one for me and one for my sister-in-law) and we have had nothing but difficulty since. The phones regularly seize up and require… Read more »