Internet Services from KKoncepts

Being a perl "fan boy" from way back, I have a lot of small perl scripts lying around that I use to look through logs for something specific. We use Cacti and Nagios for "real" monitoring, but I've got scripts to see which email accounts have failed authentication attempts, who's logged into certain services in the past X days, how many connections our email server has rejected based on blacklisting, etc., etc.

I use VirtualBox when I need to run Windows, and it works beautifully. But today I went to install some Windows software off a CD and discovered that I could no longer connect the CD drive on my laptop to VirtualBox.

I've wanted for some time to create my own custom installer for the Windows OpenVPN client. Up until now we've told clients to download the software and then given them the certificates and configuration files they needed along with instructions on how to install them. But some people still end up unable to use the VPN, which means more support calls for us.

Couriersite is a web program we've written which is designed to allow relatively easy administration of Courier email servers. It is also designed to allow others to administer different parts of the email system, thereby making less work for the overworked and under paid email administrator! To that end, it provides four programs:

All of our systems are 64-bit, but today I needed to compile a simple executable for a 32-bit system. Fortunately gcc makes that easy; just add the "-m32" switch to the command line. Unfortunately, it didn't work!

This morning I began my working day, as usual, by firing up my trusty Dell laptop. I then deviated from my normal routine and promptly sneezed all over the keyboard. I do not recommend this. While I can find no mention of this in the "how NOT to care for your Dell product" section of my "User's Guide", there certain should be. It makes a HUGE mess which requires a fair bit of time to clean up.

Like most all SQL servers, mysql supports the "LIKE" operator, which allows you to do simple wildcard matches using the percent sign (%) as the wildcard.SHOW TABLES LIKE "%user%";shows you all your tables (in the working database) which have "user" in their name.

Unfortunately this operator doesn't work with the DROP syntax. You can't sayDROP TABLE LIKE "%users%";and drop all the tables with "user" in their name. You have to list them each individually.

I recent used gtk-recordmydesktop to record a short video to explain to one of our clients how to do something complicated in the Drupal CMS. ("A picture's worth a 1000 words...", and all that.)

Unfortunately when I viewed it, I saw that the video and audio were out of sync. About 4 seconds - just enough to be really annoying and make it impossible to follow along.

Most of the KKoncepts staff are already using the Mozilla Calendar - Lightning or Sunbird. But recently we decided that we wanted to share our calendars, so we can all see what each other is doing (or not doing, as the case may be.) :-)

Being lazy, rather than set up our own calendar server, we simply created a webdav share where we all can store our calendar files. We already use a custom Apache authentication module we wrote which authenticates against our email database of username and passwords, so we can easily use Apache to control who can access which calendars.

Living in Asia means lots of character sets to deal with - Roman script, Chinese characters (Simplified and Traditional), Thai, Vietnamese, <your script here>. One day everyone will use Unicode and this won't be an issue. But today I still get support calls asking why the webmail system doesn't properly display a certain script. The answer is usually because I haven't enabled that "locale".