Archive for March, 2008

« Older Entries

Wordpress version 2.5 upgrade

Monday, March 31st, 2008

image Two hours ago I upgraded Networknet.nl with Wordpress version 2.5 and immediately after the php binaries and database were upgraded I hit my first problem. Within my Widgets Design Sidebar I have the Pages widget which shows all pages on the right side of my blog starting with “About me”.. VMware. For some topics I created pages instead of Wordpress posts and linked those pages to a parent page; these two pages were excluded from “Pages Widget”. After the upgrade my pages widget become really huge showing 30+ pages. I did a search on Wordpress support site and someone else already reported this problem; no response yet except me on this post. 

I didn’t want to downgrade my new Wordpress version and therefore I used this method to query the parent pages and exclude them manually without doing the PHP code research how to exclude them.

  • Open phpmyadmin
  • Select your wordpress database
  • Open wp_posts and click SQL

image   

  • Paste this sql query
  <p>SELECT id<br>FROM 'wp_posts'<br>WHERE 'post_type' = 'page'<br>AND 'post_parent' NOT LIKE '0' </p>
  • Click GO button and click Export; I export to CSV to excel and copied all cells into Notepad.

image

  • Paste these pages into the exclude for your pages widget.

Dirty solution but I solved my problem in less than 5 minutes for now…

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in OpenSource | No Comments »

Share your Outlook 2007 calendar online

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Internet Calendar SubscriptionsAre you looking how to share your calendar with co-workers, customers or any other email contacts who are not sitting in your Exchange organization? Today I shared my Outlook 2007 calendar which is sitting on a Exchange server with Microsoft’s Outlook Calendar Sharing Service.

The published calendar is based on the iCalendar exchange standard which is defined in RFC 2445. I love the Mircosoft’s integration and smooth registration on the internet. Check out my howto to configure this with your own Outlook 2007 calendar. 

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Office 2007 | No Comments »

Microsoft MCSE 2003 Certified

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Today I passed my third IT certification exam in image 6 months. I successfully passed the 70-296 “Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment for an MCSE Certified on Windows 2000″ exam with a score of 800. I prepared myself with one ebook  from Syngress and some additional example questions in four weeks. From today I am MCSE certified for Windows Server 2003 and I am looking forward to upgrade my certification to Windows Server 2008. I will wait for a while and get familiar with the new released operating system but eventually I will give it a try. Since 2003 I successfully passed 11 exams on row and the one of today was good example of combining my knowledge and experience and passing this one. Microsoft did a good job of getting the exam streamlined with one testing provider and hopefully things will go more smooth than today with taking the exam. With Thomson Prometric Test Center my session hanged again twice for at least 90 seconds. My next IT certification project will be VMWare Certified Professional.

Posted in Certifications | No Comments »

Installing Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1)

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

    Before you start downloading the SP1 package check your Windows Vista version. To find out which edition you are running, click Start, right-click Computer, and then click Properties. In the System section, you can view the operating system under System type. If you are installing SP1 from an installation disc, the correct version will install automatically.

    clip_image001

    Currently I am running 64-bit Operating System of Windows Vista. Download the Windows Vista SP1 Standalone update: x64 | x86

    clip_image002

    Select the language and download installation package.

    clip_image003

    After the download has completed locate the Windows6.0-KB936330-X86-wave0.exe file and exceute the SP1 update. Make sure there is enough free space on your computer’s hard disk to install the service pack. The 32-bit SP1 requires a minimum of 7 gigabytes (GB) of free space; the 64-bit SP1 requires a minimum of 13 GB of free space. Click Run if you get a security warning and click continue if UAC is enabled.

    clip_image004

    Click Next

    clip_image005

    I unchecked “Automatically restart the computer” and click Install

    clip_image006

    clip_image007

    clip_image008

      Click Restart. Vista will reboot and it will some more minutes to finish the update.

    clip_image009

        

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     clip_image010

    Installation of Service Pack 1 was successful.  I tried to install the beta versions before and as posted the installation failed each time.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Windows Vista | No Comments »

10000 visitors at Networknet since 17 january 2008

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

imageClustrMaps is the only hit counter that (i) accurately shows you the locations of all visitors to your site on a thumbnail map embedded in your page, (ii) uses dot-clusters that scale up to huge numbers, and (iii) lets you store old maps in an archive.

The advantage of ClustrMaps Pro is that you can embed the maps into your own site rather than linking to the ClustrMaps site for zoomed-in map details. On the other hand, it requires more site admin expertise, since you need to be able to access your own server logs in order to ship statistics back and forth to ClustrMaps.

Since 17th of January this year I added the ClustrMaps hit counter to see visitors at Networknet. Yesterday the website had 297 visitors and it was best day ever since the launch back in June 2007. I am working to finish my MCSE 2003 upgrade exam this week and looking forward to have some more spare time and get the blog optimized in all areas. Thank you and looking forward too see you back here.

image

Networknet.nl ClustrMap 20-march-2008

Posted in Personal | No Comments »

Cisco PIX 501 and PPTP VPN server port forwarding

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

In the following example I am configuring port forwarding to a Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition PPTP VPN server. My configuration has been configured as shown in the diagram. I have a /28 network registered on the Internet and 14 public IP Addresses are available though the SDSL ISP modem. The SDSL modem is providing these IP addresses by the internal DHCP server. For the Cisco PIX 501 firewall I am using manual assigned Public IP Address.

image

In the CLI command lines below I am configuring static NAT on a public IP Address for tcp port 1723 (pptp) and assign the private IP Address/hostname to VPN-02 which has been defined in the line “name”.

fixup protocol pptp 1723

name 192.168.5.35 VPN-02

access-list outside_access_in permit tcp any host 194.0.0.2

access-list outside_access_in permit gre any host 194.0.0.2

pdm location VPN-02 255.255.255.255 inside

static (inside,outside) tcp 194.0.0.2 pptp VPN-02 pptp netmask 255.255.255.255 0 0

What did I achieve with this configuration? After I applied this configuration I was able to connect from my Windows XP & Windows Vista clients with built-in VPN client and connect using the PPTP protocol. I also used static port forwarding on tcp 1723 port and enabled the GRE IP protocol fix by using the “fixup protocol pptp 1723″ command. Without the fixup for pptp protocol I was forced to translate complete internal host (VPN-02) and using all TCP ports. If you don’t apply to fixup than you probably will get eventlog message like one below.

Event Type:    Warning
Event Source:    Rasman
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    20209
Date:        3/18/2008
Time:        9:22:43 PM
User:        N/A
Computer:    VPN-02
Description:
A connection between the VPN server and the VPN client 87.0.0.1 has been established, but the VPN connection cannot be completed. The most common cause for this is that a firewall or router between the VPN server and the VPN client is not configured to allow Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) packets (protocol 47). Verify that the firewalls and routers between your VPN server and the Internet allow GRE packets. Make sure the firewalls and routers on the user's network are also configured to allow GRE packets. If the problem persists, have the user contact the Internet service provider (ISP) to determine whether the ISP might be blocking GRE packets.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Cisco | 3 Comments »

« Older Entries