Stephens’ Blog

Well I know I haven’t written much about the type of computing I have been doing recently,  well that is about to change.

As I work on a support desk having to do technical support and new service provisioning. I spend a lot of time working on helping our users troubleshoot issues they may have.

Recently I have been building a virtual exchange 2007 server server a virtual machine with Icewarps merak mail server. once I have the whole thing configured and built I shall do a write up on provisioning the setup.

Today I have been setting up a MS FTP 7.5 server which allows connections of SSL. The main instructions for the service were obtained from iis.net but I then encountered some problems being able to connect to the service from the Internet.

As my office has a direct VPN connect to the servers it was difficult to test the connection. what we found for the Internet was the passive connection could not be established after the initial FTP connection.

We found after reading Configuring FTP Firewall settings also from iis.net and applying the firewall rule

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="FTP for IIS7" service=ftpsvc action=allow protocol=TCP dir=in

and adding the passive connection ports to the Windows Firewall the issue seems to be resolved.

One thing I must add is that if you are using the ftp server for yourself and just want to encrypt the traffic a self signed certificate is OK but if you are opening up the server the clients, suppliers, partners or any one else I would suggest a certificate from a recognised certificate body like Thawte or Verisign and other certificate authorities are also available.

So it is only Tuesday and what a fun week it has been. The weekend brought lots of chaos.

first off my brakes stopped working. The cause of this little disaster was the brake switch deciding to fail. After  a quick phone around of the local suppliers I could only get hold of one on Monday. So I was without the use of my car over the weekend. SO I get the new switch on Monday and follow this great guide http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerothread?id=1158315 which show you exactly how to replace the part.

In other news this week I have been playing with my htc magic and I must say that it is a great phone.

I shall write more later this week

Well the last month has rushed past me a bit quick. first with the new member of the family turning up late but welcomed.

This young man arrived on the 8th of May at 13:03

He not yet camera shy but let see if with my new camera we can make him.

The Sony A200 is a nice entry level camera which I find very easy to use.

The buttons are well placed and the auto setting just works with no real missing about. I have taken stupid amounts of photos with it but I am yet to upload them to my photo gallery site

The camera battery life is nice and long which means I only have to charge it every couple of weeks.

Now that May has rushed past and the evenings are beginning to turn into some sort of normality  I shall be able to upload photos and continue with the computer projects I have running and maybe get one completed.

I have also joined twitter and will post some useful things on there. If you wish you follow me please checkout the about me page for details on how to get hold of me.

Well it has been a while is I have updated this much to my own dissatisfaction. I have been up to a few things in recent months and will try and write about everything now but I may well miss somethings.

So what have I been doing?

Ice Skating -

I have still been going fairly regularly and I am not improving at the rate I was but still a nice rate, my personal fitness could do with a lot of work but it isn’t anything to be worried about.

Computing -

1. I have been trying to setup shrewsoft VPN client to allow me to my office systems without using my desktop, this means that when I am on call I can be out and about without having to worry about staying too close to home.
2. I have also been playing the sirens game at hack3r website I am currently on level6 trying to gain access to level7 and I hope to have that done at some point tonight.

Photography -

1. Having played with my samsung trying to get the best pictures I could I decided to upgrade to the sony A200k entry level digital SLR. ( I shall write some more on the camera by the end of the week).
2. I have a photo I have taken with it up at “My Gallery” and there will be some more photos added shortly.

I thought I had better post some information on the camera I am using at present to take the photos. It is a Samsung Digimax A400 4 megapixel camera.

Samsung Digimax A400 specifications

This information was taken from dcviews.

For a while now I have been interested (jealous) of the photos some people can take without even thinking. I on the other hand only manage to get a few nice shots every once in a while. So last week I took the discison to do something about it and actually learn how to take nice great photos.

My first step was to find a basic book that would help even with a non SLR camera. I found this book, the book arrived today and after having a quick look through it I start playinig with the exposer level and seeing what difference it would make.

Over the course of the next few weeks I shall upload my photos to this site to show how they may and may not be improving.

Here is one I took yesterday during one of the many snow showers I saw yesterday.

Just before Christmas I decided to order a documentary I had heard about on one of the hak5 episode that I have finally managed to find time to watch, it turned up yesterday which I thought was a great delivery response around the Christmas period. I am actually managed to find time to watch it last night whilst I was doing some out of hours work.

The documentary is call hackers are people too and is available from this website. The documentary focus on hackers and asks for their view on how the media perceive them, how they perceive them selves  and how the culture has or has not change of the past decades.  I must say this does beat any of the films out about hacking and goes some way to bring a new way of looking at the mainstream of hackers, as yes there are bad hackers but that is a small percentage of the whole spectrum.

Hackers Are People Too Trailer from Ashley Schwartau on Vimeo.

I would recommend everyone watch this, for no other reason is that the next time you hear the words “A hacker broke into … today” you may have a different view on what to think.

First off I would liek to wish everyone a happy new year.

As I do almost every year I am going to attempt to write on this blog more often. I shall also write up here  wider variety of subjects.

Over the course of Decemeber I spent most of my time preparing for the Christmas period that is now upon us and thankfully almost over. I am not saying I am not a fan of Christmas but I must say that I can’t be doing with the whole let rush around to see everybody. That being said as this year as well as last years Christmas was quite a quiet affair I did find myself relaxed over the period which is a new feeling for me.

I haven’t written much in regards to computer related topic up here as of late and part of the reason is because I am spend alot of time researching how to offer a cut down version of Microsoft Exhange in a hosted environment for work. Once I have the project put in place and actually start to configure the service I shall write something on the principle. The webbook I have which is the Compaq 2133 is still going strong and I am still using it when I just need to do something quickly.

I have also managed to catch up on watching a internet programme I dive in and out of which is hak5. this is a internet TV show geared towards technology and computing with so very cool ideas.

As soon as I have anything more interesting to say I shall put it up on this blog.

Well it has a long time since I have updated this with what I am actually doing, so here goes.

On Sunday I did the usual think of going ice skating and I most say that over the past couple of month I have been improve a lot, I still can’t ice hockey stop but that will come with time.

Over the Weekend I decided to upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu 8.10. I decide to do this at 22:00 on a Saturday night which is never the best idea I could have as I kept falling asleep and the whole process didn’t finish until 5:00 the following morning and then I had to go back through the ubuntu guide to make sure everything was working on my laptop correctly.

All of last week I was learning about Active Directory (AD) at the “Learning Tree” centre in London. I must admit that I did know some of the things that were being discussed the slightly more basic things such as adding machines to the domain, promoting a machine to be a domain controller and creating users, groups, Organisational Units (OUs), but I was unclear about how to actually plan an AD but this course I believe has helped put me in the mind set of what requirements to look at when planning.
Also on Sunday the 26th of October I was invited by Microsoft to watch an American Football game at Wembley Stadium in there corporate box. It was the San Diego Chargers Vs New Orleans Saints. The Saints went on to win the game but is was a close game which went down to the wire.

That is about all I have done over the past week and a bit and I shall update with a bit more technical information shortly.

For some stupid reason I didn’t change the permalinks on this site when I moved it from one server to another, this meant that when I did change it today most of the site wasn’t working. Arghhhhhhhhhhh

The only way so I did a search which lead me to this page at codex.wordpress.org. This page give out the basics of permalinks and a quick read of the page showed me that my virtual host coonfiguration for this domain in apache was missing some options.

This is what I was missing

<Directory /path-to-website/>
AllowOverride ALL
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

Once I had added that and done the necessary “httpd -k restart” to pick up the new changes in the config it all came together and started to work.