March 25, 2008 2:25 am by Markus.

I’m hosting a little phpBB installation and had some problems with the conversion script that comes with phpBB for the conversion of the forum. It seems that the timeout-values for PHP by 1and1 are set too conservatively. I found that adding the following lines to the “install/install_convert.php” file does the trick (credit for this trick) :

@set_time_limit(0);
@ini_set(’memory_limit’, ‘256M’);
@ini_set(’upload_max_filesize’, ‘128M’);
@ini_set(’post_max_size’, ‘256M’);
@ini_set(’max_input_time’, ‘-1′);
@ini_set(’max_execution_time’, ‘-1′);
@ini_set(’expect.timeout’, ‘-1′);
@ini_set(’default_socket_timeout’, ‘-1′);

Having the conversion script reload also seems to help a bit…

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February 12, 2008 1:24 am by Markus.

I was playing around with the VMWare player and an Windows XP image trying to establish a VPN connection with Microsoft’s VPN Client. It worked just fine, connected and then got stuck at “Verifying Username and Password”. After a while it aborted with a time-out error (was it error 638 or 721?). It turns out that GRE (General Routing Encapsulation) doesn’t deal well with multiple network address translations (e.g. using VMWare Networks with NAT and then my DSL-Router). It worked once I changed it to bridged network. This took me a couple of hours to figure out…

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October 9, 2007 7:30 pm by Markus.

After installing the various gpg-agent packages (gpgsm, gpgagent etc.) and still no luck a simple “sudo apt-get install pinentry-qt” did the trick (installs the password-entry dialog). Note that you have to start the gpg-agent manually (eval `gpg-agent –daemon`) before starting KMail.

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January 29, 2007 1:53 pm by Markus.

A friend of mine recently fried one of his linksys router, a WRT54G (hardware version 2.0), after trying to upgrade the firmware. The box is old, no more warranty and all that. Since I played a bit with eWRT linux on the Linksys a while ago, he thought I might have use for a broken router (maybe as a paper-weight). Turns out the power light was blinking forever, but the routers firmware didn’t come up. I recall having seen some documents on the web on fixing a broken Linksys WRT54G firmware (search for “unbrick wrt54g”; that took me a while to find). Here’s what worked for me using linux. First, download the matching firmware for your router from the linksys website. Then I pressed the reset-button, plugged in the power (holding the reset-button down) and kept holding the reset-button down for about 5-6 seconds, and then started the process below (i.e. I typed all that beforehand, just hitting enter for the put command). The router will be on IP 192.168.1.1 and will accept firmware updates with TFTP. It seems that even is the case without boot_wait being set to on.

ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 up 192.168.1.100
# clear your local firewall rules if you have to!

tftp 192.168.1.1
tftp> mode binary
tftp> rexmt 1
tftp> trace
tftp> timeout 300
tftp> put code.bin

You might have to try several times to get the timing right. You can also check with tcpdump if you get arp-replys/pings back from the router.

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November 22, 2006 1:34 pm by Markus.

I just helped Michelle get her Cisco VPN Client to work after she got an “Error 51” asking her to ensure that she at least one network adapter enabled (which was the case). The client software wouldn’t even startup to let us configure anything. After a couple of calls to tech-support, finding out that the error isn’t explained in the manual and a re-installations we found the following to work: disable the Firewall and Virus-software (McAfee in that case; make sure your machine is still behind another firewall, e.g. your routers’ firewall), go to the Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services. Then stop and restart the “Cisco Systems, Inc. VPN Service”. The startup setting should be set to automatic BTW.

I still don’t quite understand why this works (Shouldn’t the client communicate with the service using named pipes? Shouldn’t the firewall be irrelevant for the startup of the client?), but hey…

Please leave a comment if that worked for you; or whatever workaround you found. Thanks.

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