I recently installed SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (don’t ask) and wanted to get it to listen on a TCP/IP socket as well (this is by default off, go Microsoft!). I enabled TCP/IP sockets in the configuration editor, but it didn’t work. There was a listener on 1026/tcp (?) but not on 1433/tcp. Google’s first few hits only told me what I had already done, but the Microsoft Knowledge Base item on the second results page pointed me in the right direction: the "SQL Browser Service" must be enabled and running. It seems to be disabled in the default (Express Edition at least) install.

Time for another rant… when writing PHP code, PLEASE PRETTY PLEASE use <?php instead of the short-sucky <? tag to start your PHP code. This is disabled on many machines, including all of mine. This means whenever I find such an application I want to use, I install it on my server and it goes bork. Sometimes, everywhere <?php is used except in 1 or 2 places, making the thing fail when you’re least expecting it.

This  implies you have to use <?php echo instead of <?= too, and yes, that is more work, but it’s certainly much nicer, as I don’t have to open each and every .php and .inc and .whatever file, replacing <?= by <?php echo, <? by <?php and then <?phpphp by <?php, right?

Yes PowerAdmin , RackTables , ZenPhoto , I’m looking at you. 

Edit: Oh look, WordPress doesn’t make &lt; out of < in the post title – bug reported. I think.

Installed Firefly Media Server on my home fileserver for fun (unfortunately not for profit 😉 ), and installed iTunes on my desktop. Never used it, but hey, it supports DAAP and that’s the big deal, right? 🙂 I have 22K+ songs in my iTunes player now, advertised via mDns multicast "modern" stuff. Yay!

Tried to use it in Amarok on my laptop as well, but no dice. If I add the machine manually, I can browse the files via DAAP, but the actual discovery doesn’t seem to work. I installed the avahi daemon which takes care of mDNS discovery, but it still doesn’t want to find it.. 🙁 Any tips?

I’d think sub-albums are basic part of any gallery/album software, yet Zenphoto which is supposed to be all-new and web2.0’ish still doesn’t support it after more than a year… how hard can it be? 🙁 Dissapointing…

If you’re there tomorrow, and you want to see me, gimme a yell 🙂

Hopefully this time the wireless network won’t be a notwork. 😀

At work, Mobistar delegated our reverse DNS to a zone with a slash in it. I didn’t even know this was legal in DNS but apparently it is, and BIND and PowerDNS serve it perfectly. I installed PowerAdmin to manage my PowerDNS records with a GUI (MySQL INSERT/UPDATE was becoming a bit tedious), but could not create a domain nor any entries below it (after creating the domain through MySQL), because it wouldn’t accept the / as a valid character. I cooked up a small patch (don’t know if it’s complete, I just know it works for me) which you can find here .

testing.bitlbee.org is back since a few days… on a machine owned and hosted by yours truly. After the project suffered loss of their main testing public server due to hardware failure I stepped up to offer new hosting; as soon as the files were recovered from the other machine the server was put up again. Feel free to use it (or my other IM server, running stable bitlbee, at im.codemonkey.be) for all your Bitlbee needs. Happy IM’ing!

Okay, that may be a slight overreaction, but there’s surely a surge of new versions fixing security holes these days ;(

I’ve been working on upgrading my mail gateway setup to something a little more decent, and as of tonight (in my new testsetup) I’ve implemented relay recipient maps in postfix. Should be way better the gateway mailqueue and also for the internet as a whole, since I won’t be generating any more blowback like I am doing now (when mailing to a nonexisting address, the gateway accepts the mail, tries to deliver, then creates a bounce message and tries to deliver that one, usually trying to email nonexisting users or innocent bystanders whose From: address was forged). Also implemented some SNMP polling for queue size, more to follow. Yay. 🙂

 PS: Thanks to DaViper for providing me with a virtual machine and a subnet to host my off-net DNS and Mailgateway on, much appreciated!

A few days ago a vulnerability in RealVNC was discovered allowing anyone to take over a desktop without any authentication at all (the client is allowed to select the authentication mechanism, of which one is "none"). Not too smart, but ohwell :s I wonder how much this effects the other VNC derivatives, since I thought their code was based off the "original" VNC. However, if they’re fixed, why didn’t they alert the RealVNC maintainers?

In the meanwhile I saw a basic scanner and a refined multithreaded scanner appear on Bugtraq . Fun for the kiddies! I don’t really do any firewall logging at the moment, but as noted in Filbert’s blog, scanning has certainly taken a steep curve upwards.