Category: Infrastructure
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Free SSL Certificates from StartSSL
— update 2017-03-20 StartSSL was bought by a bad boy and has been banned, don’t use them now– Whenever I have to replace a server certificate I curse because I have to pay so much for so little. The whole industry is an conspiracy against the small businessman. In the past I have purchased certificates…
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The best Acronis backup scheme
— Update 2016-01-03 read about my new approach to backup — Acronis is a full featured backup application. Because it can do almost anything it is very difficult to configure. As is often the case, the first thing to work out is what you want to accomplish. Scenario I have a laptop and travel for…
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Accessing Webmin as http://localhost:10000 through an ssh tunnel
If you have an EC2 server it is great to install Webmin on it but it undesirable to expose it through the EC2 firewall. An easier and more secure way to access it is using PuTTY to create a tunnel from a local port to a remote port. When you have done this you can…
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How to install WordPress Multisite on Virtual Box
I do all my development on a Windows 7 computer but the natural environment for WordPress execution is Linux. I would like to use my tools on Windows and then see the running code on a Linux box. One way of doing this is to use a virtual appliance. This is what we are going to…
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Tomcat 7 on Windows is not UTF-8 by default
When building web applications one typically uses UTF-8 encoding thoughout to ensure that you can send and receive text in multi-byte languages such as Russian, and Chinese. The Window 7 version of Tomcat is (insanely) not UTF-8 by default. This is because it picks up the default encoding from your installation of Java which is…
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Skype stops Tomcat 7 working on port 80
I recently reinstalled my Rialo application server on a Windows 7 Home Premium PC. I changed the port in server.xml from 8080 to 80 but Tomcat no longer would serve pages. After about an hour I found a forum post that blamed Skype. Sure enough I stopped Skype and Tomcat now runs. c:\ netstat -abn…
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Netgear WNR1000v3 router port forwarding bug
My router was supplied by Plusnet (firmware V1.0.2.30_53.0.66B1). It has several bugs in the port forwarding function. First the good news: It WILL forward port 80 to port 80 on another server Now the bugs: The User Interface prohibits forwarding any inbound port to other well known ports such as 8080 The User Interface permits…
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SQL Server Import Wizard cannot import fields containing more than 255 characters
I have been importing data from Excel to SQL Server using the SQL Server Import Wizard. Usually there is no problem but I have found a bug. 1. To reproduce: Try to import a column containing more than 255 characters text, optimistically set the destination datatype to nvarchar(max) and the failure options to “ignore” on…
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Office 2013 upgrade – red pill or blue pill?
The red pill and its opposite, the blue pill, are pop culture symbols representing the choice between the blissful ignorance of illusion (blue) and embracing the sometimes painful truth of reality (red). Wikipedia about The Matrix movie I have to decide whether to upgrade to Office 2013. If I want my life to be easy I should just take the blue…
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Why you should put an SSD in your laptop
I have an elderly Dell Studio 1558 running Windows 7 and the boot time is 2 mins 28 s and the time to complete the login and start-up applications was 4 mins 30s. It is well-known that start-up time increase as a system gets older. This is due to the accumulation of bad registry keys, poor drivers,…
Dr James Bayley 