Archive for July, 2005

I hate Mondays

By
Andy
 – July 12, 2005Posted in: Hardware, Windows

Phew, what a Monday! I generally leave Monday for doing the tedious, no effort jobs because I just can´t be bothered to do anything else. Yesterday I didn´t get a chance to do this though…
 
The boss was off on holiday and this means that there are a few more things that I have to deal with in his absence. We also had a school work experience student in so I had to find him some things to do as well.
 
Got off to a not bad start sorting out the emails I´d accumulated over the weekend and soon figured out that I was going to have to spend the entire morning knocking up a couple of basic sites. I was just getting down to creating the home page for Medical Seminars when the power went down for no reason!

 
Luckily I had just done a save so I didn´t loose too much stuff, but Sam (work experience lad) was in the middle of installing Service Pack 2 on the PC he was setting up to use for the week. When the power finally came back on I went round and started the servers that weren´t on UPSes. Unfortunately, Sam´s wouldn´t reboot and was just coming up with what looked like memory access errors in assembler (I did Electronic & Compter Engineering at Uni) and I think the power outage had done something to the controller on the bottom of the Hard Drive.
 
By mid afternoon we´d managed to get the drive accessible as a slave in another box and imaged it onto a working drive but it appeared that the installation was corrupt and we had to start again. That was a day wasted!

Phew! Servers moves are fun!

By
Andy
 – July 8, 2005Posted in: Linux

Well, I´ve got around to setting up the development servers in the office, distributing the development files and databases across them and set up the backup routines. I´ve also changes all the files to take into account the server move so all I need to do now is set up the new servers, move accross and test.

 
The move and testing are pretty simple since it´ll just require taking down the database at a certain point, moving the files accross and bringing it live again. As long as I do this at stupid-o-clock then nobody should loose any info or even notice.
 
The main problem is the DNS shift. If I was moving to another host then this would take 24 hours and result in serious downtime, but since the same DNS servers are being used and there is just an IP address change it should go through a lot quicker. I´ll still do it at night to minimise disruption though. The only problem is that it requires going through a two minute process to change the IP address the domain points to in the control panel and we´ve got about 4,000 domains! I think I might need a sleeping bag and a lot of coffee that night!

Finally got me a copy of vBulletin

By
Andy
 – July 7, 2005Posted in: Web Development

We´ve been talking about setting up a forum for a while for NHS Forum and although I´ve done a few minor ones in the past they didn´t need any user profiles, moderators or anything so were pretty simple. But this one is more along the lines of the big ones and since its for the medical community then it needs all the bells and whistles.
 
I talked about it with my boss and figured it would take me about 6 months to write all the code for my own version and that to buy vBulletin would cost about ?80. Since this is a little less than my wages for 6 months we thought that would be the best option. I showed him a few of the forums I go on and we came up with what we wanted and I checked out the site to make sure it´d do everything we wanted. It was all good so we went and bought a copy.
 
I´ve still got to install it and have a play around but one of the things that I like is that it´s modular and PHP so I can start messing around and altering it. The first thing will be to set it so only those with a .nhs email address can sign up since its for the health service only. I´ll post next week about how I get on.

Hacker? Nope MS Feature

By
Andy
 – July 5, 2005Posted in: Windows

I was just browsing the custom log files for one of our most important sites and came accross the following page been requested:

 
/MSOffice/cltreq.asp?UL=… etc
 
and assumed that some little shit was trying to hack my server. Not very well considering that it definately looked like an attack against IIS and I´m running on Apache. I decided to have a look around and got this off Google
 
These requests are generated by someone using IE with Microsoft Office installed. IE will query the server to see if it supports web discussions. This query will only happen if the user has the discussion bar turned on. The discussion bar appears by clicking the "Discuss" icon or View-> Explorer Bar-> Discuss. The bar is off by default.

 
Hmmm… Typical way of doing things over in Redmond.

Rich Text Editor and Mac OS

By
Andy
 – July 4, 2005Posted in: Linux, Web Development

All the problems are solved! After spending all day pouring through javascript, Googling the forums to death and non stop testing I´ve finally cracked it! Some users were having trouble entering data on our site and I finally managed to figure out that most of them were using IE5.2 on the Mac. Turns out that the features of the Rich Text Editor I was using along with similar editors is powered by the browser. I kind of knew this but didn´t know how it was done.
 
Turns out that its implemented in IE in versions 5 and above (but not on the Mac) using something called MSHTML and in the various Mozilla browsers through Midas (I think). These are pretty much compatible but if the browser doesn´t support one of them then your users have no way of using one of these editors.
 
I´ve just had to go through and change the sites so that those who haven´t got up to date browsers can stick text in using standard textareas. Just to make it a bit neater I´ve hidden them inside hidden divs until they click on a link to show them. Not too bad considering.

Im just going to scream into a pillow…

By
Andy
 – July 4, 2005Posted in: Web Development

I´ve been working where I do for a couple of years now and most of that time I´ve been building up various websites that are now finally starting to get used a lot more. Unfortunately they are now being used by real people (I miss the days when Googlebot was my only visitor). This is a good thing but I´ve never had the chance to test any of the bloody things in more than a few browsers.

 
End result: all the complicated javascript form validation and stuff doesn´t work, I have to disable it to get it working for everyone and then some pillock comes along and starts submitting the forms without filling anything in! SO annoying….

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