Do you have a HostGator shared account and you’re seeing Internal Server Errors intermittently on otherwise-working code? I have a couple of domains at HostGator (not this domain). One of them experience this issue for several days. Randomly, loading any page on the site would generate “Internal Server Error” and the message in this post […]
Category: Tech
Technical things that might help someone someday.
After years of putting up with Rick and his digital photo editing services crap I think I have finally figured out a way to block these messages. Here’s the deal. You run a mail server, and you get spam every single day from Rick offering digital photo editing services. You put “We are a china […]
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Variable interpolation in Batch Files
Apparently it is possible to use variable interpolation in Windows batch files. @echo off set myVar=bob goto print_%myVar% echo ALICE :print_bob echo BOB Output is: BOB Useful for all kinds of things…
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Android sends read receipts automatically
I was surprised recently when someone responded to a read-receipt showing when I had read one of their messages. Like many others, I turned off Outlook’s option to send read receipts automatically many years ago. Since I had just changed Exchange 2010 mail providers, I assumed that I had missed this option and simply needed […]
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Munin and High Loads
Munin, while a great monitoring tool, can be a little bit of a CPU hog. I had installed it awhile back and looked at the graphs just for fun now and then (I’m lucky, my servers are humming along pretty smoothly), but I started noticing load averages were measurably higher than they were before I […]
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Countering a Slow Loris Apache attack
Here is a poor man’s way to mitigate a slow loris attack. The DoS attack, not the fuzzy mammal with the poisonous elbows. If you’re reading this, hopefully you’ve searched and figured out what the slow loris attack is all about. You probably also run Apache 1.x or 2.x. I read about the antiloris module […]
Here is a quick Perl one-liner that lets you tail an Apache log file and view nicely-formatted output: tail -f YOURDOMAIN_LOG_FILE | perl -ne ‘$|=1;my ($host,$date,$url,$status,$size,$referrer,$agent) = $_ =~ m/^(\S+) – – \[(\S+ [\-|\+]\d{4})\] “(\S+ \S+ [^”]+)” (\d{3}) (\d+|-) “(.*?)” “([^”]+)”$/;print $host . ” – ” . $date . ” – ” . $url .”\n”;’ […]
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Run child perl script in the background
I had a situation where a parent Perl script (web-accessible, in cgi-bin) needed to call a long-running child Perl script that was outside cgi-bin. I wanted the parent to call the child and then exit immediately, allowing the parent script browser window to stop loading and the child to continue running in the background and […]
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Domain misspelling phishing sites
There’s no quicker way to give hackers your Facebook username and password than to mistype the Facebook URL in your browser window and type it into a phishing site. (Phishing sites are designed to look like the real site, but are run by Very Bad People With Nothing Better To Do so that they can […]
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WordPress Comments Always Visible
If you need to make WordPress comments visible on the index page (not just within a post), add this line wherever you want comments to show: <?php $withcomments = true; comments_template();?> You might need to disable comments elsewhere in the template, or they might show up twice, but that depends on the theme. One commenter […]