This is a follow-up to my [2006 post][1]. It’s a shame I’m not using Windows any more and I can’t figure this out for OS X, but the old post continues to get hits, so I thought I would neaten things up a bit!

I haven’t completely tested this system with more recent versions of Azureus/Vuze, but all the files seem to be much the same, so I’m guessing it will be OK. Please leave any comments with news to the contrary.

As before, I have taken much of my information from other places, but I feel put it together in an easier to follow manner. In particular, the bulk of ideas came from the [azureus wiki][3]

###Step 1: Install Azureus and enable Headless operation

1. Download the executable installer from [sourceforge][2]
2. Ensure that the installation directory contains the file Azureus2.jar
3. Download the files log4j.jar and commons-cli.jar from [here][4] and place into the Azureus directory. This will allow command-line (headless) operation.
4. To run, use command java -jar Azureus2-XXX.jar --ui=console

[1]: http://shayne.powerlot.net/2006/08/07/running-azureus-as-a-windows-service/
[2]: http://azureus.sourceforge.net
[3]: http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/RunAzureusAsAService
[4]: http://azureus.sourceforge.net/index_CVS.php

After the failure of a [JetDirect][1] server on one of [our][4] workgroup printers, I purchased a [NetGear PS101][2] mini print server to replace it. We have had joy with a similar D-link machine on another printer, so I was confident this would work.

It did work, but not without some fiddling around.

To start with, the server management software would not install on our Windows 2003 domain server. I didn’t chase down why because I didn’t want to have to use it anyway. It had something to do with the 16-bit subsystem. But it was a bad start.

Thanks to [this thread on the netgear forums][3] I was able to get things working to my satisfaction, and without having to use the print server software. Here’s the summary.

1. Discover the IP address the DHCP server had allocated to the print server, log into the web interface and then set a permanent IP address.
2. Go to Printers and Faxes and “add a new printer”. When asked for a port, create a new one.
3. Choose “standard tcp/ip port”
4. Set the IP address to the one you fixed.
5. Do not try to select a particular print server or network card, just use the “choose generic network card” option.
6. Finish creating the printer as normal.
7. Go to the properties of that printer, go to the Port tab and then select “port properties” of the port you created.
8. Set the protocol to LPR, make the queue name “L1″ and enable “LPR byte counting”.
9. It took me a while to realise this, but I needed to reset the printer before continuing. Check the status page of the online management and if you see “offline” or something similar then a reset will probably solve that problem.

This took far too long to sort out today. When I installed the D-link earlier this year it only took minutes. But it is working now and is likely to stay that way. Good.

[1]: http://www.hp.com/go/jetdirect
[2]: http://www.netgear.com/Products/PrintServers/WiredPrintServers/PS101.aspx
[3]: http://forum1.netgear.com/showthread.php?t=2746
[4]: http://wonguthacaps.wa.edu.au

At Wongutha CAPS, where I am the sysadmin-by-default, our accounts people use Quickbooks 2002.

At the end of last year, we upgraded our network to a whole bunch of lovely new desktops and a super-duper Windows 2003 server (replacing our old NT4 server). Thanks to Google search and Microsoft TechNet I have been able to come somewhat to grips with Active Directory and even managed to set up a few useful Group Policies.

I have also managed to set up appropriate levels of access for most of the users, so that we haven’t simply had students with low level access and almost all the staff as administrators!

Unfortunately, Quickbooks managed to throw me a curly one in the form of this error:

User Access Rights Problem: Your user account for Windows was created with restricted access to system resources. This will prevent Quickbooks from operating properly. Please contact your system administrator and ask him or her to grant you standard user rights.

I searched high and low for a solution to this problem without joy. Eventually, when pushed by higher priority jobs, I just made all the users of Quickbooks administrators (against my better judgement…) and left it for later.

Later came, and I order a trial version of QB 2007, which I hoped might have solved this problem.

It didn’t. Back to the google drawing board.

I did find a fairly convoluted hack that involved making a QuickBooksUser group, and changing permissions on certain directories and registry keys to allow this group full access. I couldn’t get it to work with group policy, and it just seemed a bit unreliable.

So. I thought outside the box for a minute (which is very much against my normal nature ) and came up with this partial solution: I created the QuickBooksUser group as above, but rather than try to fiddle all the keys and directories, I simply made that group a member of the local (NB: Local, not domain or global) administrators group on the boxes that had quickbooks installed, like this:

In control panel, go to User Accounts, and then select the Advanced tab, and click the Advanced button. This brings up the “Local Users and Groups” dialogue. On the right, open Groups, and then double-click on Administrators. You can then click “Add” and type in QuickBooksUsers and OK all the way…

So to describe this another way: All the users who need to use Quick Books, when they log on to one of the computers that has it installed, are made into Administrators while on that computer ONLY. Yes, this is a security flaw in that I have given them permissions that they need not have. However, they are limited to doing bad things on that computer only.

So I feel I have limited the risks, while still allowing necessary use of an important program, without giving them full domain admin rights.

In other news: this has solved another problem that I have had. Many staff members have their own notebook computers. By me not giving them full administrator privileges, they are limited in their ability to install programs, run certain programs and generally managed their own PCs (all of which are used for personal as well as school business).

My existing solution has been to set them up a local account on their computer, give it admin rights, and teach them how to use the “run as” command. Worked sometimes, but not a seamless solution.

This new trick works perfectly well for this too… Just search for the individual user whose computer it is, and add them to the Administrators group. And there you go, they can trash their own computer to their heart’s content, without me putting the whole domain at risk!

I am currently running three sites.

Not being one to reinvent the wheel, I am running them all with WordPress, Sandbox and Unsleepable for Sandbox, a combination I find manageable and appealing.

Unfortunately, when everything is much the same, the same problems will appear as well! Check out the following screen shots of CastletownChemist.Com under firefox and IE7 for windows:

As you can see, while similar, they do not look the same. The net seems awash with bloggers having problems with IE (firstly IE6 and even now IE7) messing with their look-and-feel. My problem (the nav menu being below the title rather than next to it) seems to be minor in comparison to some.

I found two posts from last year that have addressed the problem (both were focussed on IE6, but the problem remains): Sam Devol’s “WordPress Troubleshooting: My blog looks horrible in IE!” and Nektros’ “7 step guide to fixing your WordPress sidebar in Internet (bloody) Explorer”.

Neither of these related directly to my setup, calling for an addition to header.php in the theme file. Because Sandbox then calls another function within header.php, I needed to dig a bit further.

Now please understand, I do not know php and I only know basic programming principles, but I can look at what others have done and try to steal their ideas.

This is what I did:

1. Create an iestyle.css file in the unsleepable directory (/wp-content/themes/sandbox/skins/unsleepable)
2. Found functions.php in /wp-content/themes/sandbox

3. Edited the function sandbox_stylesheets() by adding the following code under the existing stylesheet link:

   <!--[if IE]>
   <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php echo get_template_directory_uri() . “/skins/$skin/iestyle.css” ?>” media=”screen” />
   <![endif]-->

In English, this checks if the browser is Internet Explorer, and if it is, calls another stylesheet (in the directory of the current skin) and uses it in addition to the regular stylesheet (and with priority over it).

I have done this and confirmed that it does in fact give styles to the page. Now I just need to go through Nektros’ article to see what I can actually do to the CSS to improve my problem.

This post has been superceded. Please check out [Running Azureus as a windows service revisited][1].

I am in the process of writing another howto.

Actually, all I am doing is documenting a process that I went through to get Azureus running as a windows service. I really wanted to be able to have (down+up)loads working even when the computer is in a logged out state, or logged in under another user.

There were plenty of tips around, but really nothing that spelled it out step-by-step.

This document is far from complete, but if you would like to see what has been done so far, download the first draft here (.odt document at the moment, so will need Openoffice or similar to read).

Please don’t hesitate to leave comments if you happen to find this and have something useful to add!

[1]: http://shayne.powerlot.net/2008/10/22/running-azureus-as-a-windows-service-revisited/

Please note, this is not about spam filtering. Filtering is like shutting the barn
door after the horse has bolted. Having said that, it is often necessary, but luckily can be
done when it is.

This document is about protecting your email address so that it does not get into the hands
of those who would abuse it. Now that is easier said than done. Consider all of these things
that you may do on the internet:

• Post to a publically viewable forum, mailing list or usenet group
• Sign up for a “special offer”
• Register for access to a site
• Put your contact details on a web page
• etc, etc …

Each of these things (and no doubt many more that I haven’t thought of) put your email
address within reach of friendly spammers. Once they have it, it has a tendency to multiply
as those helpful people share their information with each other!

… So prevention is much better than cure …

OK, online tip #1.

One of my great finds of the last year has been an online bookmarking service called “delicious”, which you will find at http://del.icio.us

Anyone familiar will this sort of thing will tell you that there are a number of similar services around, but this is the one I found first, and even after flirting with one of the others (spurl.net) I have come back to delicious.

When I first discovered delicious, I was using about 5 different computers (and perhaps more at certain times) every week. All of which I might take online, find something useful and want to come back to it. This creates a very difficult situation with respect to bookmarks.

I tried a couple of firefox extension which had the potential to act as synchronisers, but didn’t have much joy.

Then along came delicious.

You have to see it to realise what it can do. And then sign up and play with it to really have a good look!! It’s like a lot of things on the net, unless you have a play, you will miss out on most of the good features.

Go and have a look at my bookmarks

What you will hopefully see is a list of my most recent bookmarks. You will read the title, which will be in larger font and will be a hyperlink. Click on it if you want to see it… Underneath that there may or may not be a comment and underneath that, the “tags” that I have used to classify the link and a figure of how many other people have marked it too! (Oh, and the date)

Down on the right hand side you will see a (very) long list of all the tags that I use. You can click on any of these to see all of the links I have put that tag on to. Try it, click “computer”…

You will see that the link has taken you to http://del.icio.us/wynter/computer, I’m sure you can see the pattern. But wait, there is more! You will notice that there is now a second column of links to the left of the other one. These are the “related tags” and that means that these are all the tags that I have used ALONG WITH “computer”. If you click on one of them (don’t at this point) you will go to that list of links. But the better trick is to click on the plus-sign next to the tag. Try it, click on the one next to “esperance”.

You should now be at http://del.icio.us/wynter/computer+esperance – get it? These link(s) (there is only one at this stage – the google group home page) are all the ones that I have tagged with both “computer” and “esperance”.

Two quick tips before I go:

1. replace my user name (wynter) with the word “tag” to see all (ie everyone’s) links with those tags, eg http://del.icio.us/tag/computer+esperance – this shows the same stuff at the moment, but if any of you were to decide to bookmark any pages that might be of interest to the “Esperance+Computer” Club might be interested in, then they would show up here!

2. Do you understand RSS? If not, ignore this bit. If you do, have a look at the link that is under the orange icon with RSS on it. Copy the link and put it in your newsreader or whatever you use (I use one or both of Firefox and Thunderbird, depending on the type of link). Now, whenever a new link is posted, it will show up in your reader, a bit like an email….

OK, this was a long post, but I suggest you sign up (no email required, but necessary if you ever want to recover your password) and have a play. Make sure you read the help section but be warned, this is not all that easy to get your head around straight away.

Go and enjoy your delicious meal.

How to use External Javascripts to keep links etc the same over various pages in a web site

2005-04-12

Create Javascript with appropriate text

function bottom_links()
{
document.write('<p>');
document.write('<a href="#top">Top</a> ');
document.write('|  ');
}

Save the file as file.js

Import the JS file into your html file

Type the following into the <head> section of the html file:

<SCRIPT language="JavaScript" SRC="file.js"></SCRIPT>

Call the function somewhere in the html file and the text will be inserted as programmed

<SCRIPT language="JavaScript">bottom_links()</script>

You can now change the links as you like and all the pages where the java is used can show the updated text!!