Sysadmins of the North - Technical blog, where topics include: computer, server, web, sysadmin, MySQL, database, virtualization, optimization and security

How to use SSL in PHP Data Objects (PDO) mysql

Jan Reilink on 7 August 2018

connect securely to your MySQL database from PHP PDO using an SSL encrypted connection

If you want to connect securely to your MySQL database over SSL using PHP Data Objects (PDO), here is how…

A cheat-sheet for password crackers

Jan Reilink on 22 March 2018

A cheat-sheet for password crackers that may come in handy sometime, by m3g9tr0n.
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Windows privilege escalation guide

Jan Reilink on 22 March 2018

Ryan McFarland writes on his blog: “Privilege escalation always comes down to proper enumeration. But to accomplish proper enumeration you need to know what to check and look for. This takes familiarity with systems that normally comes along with experience. At first privilege escalation can seem like a daunting task, but after a while you start to filter through what is normal and what isn’t. It eventually becomes easier to know what to look for rather than digging through everything hoping to find that needle in the haystack. Hopefully this guide will provide a good foundation to build upon and get you started.”

Windows Server 2019 – now available in preview

Jan Reilink on 21 March 2018

Yesterday (March 20th) was a big day for Windows Server! On behalf of the entire Windows Server team, Erin Chapple (Director of Program Management, Windows Server) announced Windows Server 2019 will be generally available in the second half of calendar year 2018. Starting now, you can access the preview build through Microsoft’s Insiders program.

A plea for WordPress plugin developers to stop supporting legacy PHP versions

Jan Reilink on 21 March 2018

“A plea for plugin developers to stop supporting legacy PHP versions” (hear! hear!), Jeff Chandler writes on WP Tavern. Iain Poulson has published a thoughtful request on the Delicious Brains blog asking WordPress plugin developers to stop supporting legacy PHP versions. He covers some of the benefits of developing with newer versions of PHP, what Delicious Brains is doing with its plugins, and using the Requires Minimum PHP Version header in readme.txt.

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: [] operator not supported for strings – PHP 7.1

Jan Reilink on 2 March 2018

With PHP 7.1, some PHP web applications fail because of deprecated code usage. This may result in an error message like [] operator not supported for strings for various Joomla! components. Here’s how to fix this code for PHP 7.1+.

Windows Server 2016 on Hyper-V stuck at stopping

Jan Reilink on 28 February 2018

… and the guest server VM won’t reboot

If a Windows Server 2016 guest VM on Hyper-V hangs while stopping after Windows Updates, it might be caused by the recovery debug information type set. Especially when you have moved the Windows PageFile to a different partition/VHDX.

Set WP_MEMORY_LIMIT value correctly in wp-config.php

Jan Reilink on 26 February 2018

WordPress developers: please stay away from WP_MEMORY_LIMIT and PHP memory_limit settings! We see this done wrong over and over in WordPress plugins and themes. One of such themes is the premium theme Jupiter by Artbees, or WPML as plugin. WordPress users: don’t touch these memory limitation settings either! They’re imposed for a reason. Here’s some explanation:

List all SPNs used in your Active Directory

Jan Reilink on 26 February 2018

There are a lot of hints & tips out there for troubleshooting SPNs, or Service Principal Names. Listing duplicate SPNs is fairly easy, just use setspn -X on your command-line and you’ll find out. But how do you find out which SPNs are used for which users and computers are used for this?

The need for speed: Google dedicates engineering team to accelerate development of WordPress ecosystem

Jan Reilink on 6 February 2018

Search Engine Land writes that Google’s partnership with WordPress aims to jump-start the platform’s support of the latest web technologies — particularly those involving performance & mobile experience. And they’re hiring WordPress experts.

Important note about Windows Update KB4056892

Jan Reilink on 5 January 2018

There is another VERY IMPORTANT THING with Microsoft Meltdown patches like update KB4056892: – Customers will not receive these security updates and will not be protected from security vulnerabilities unless their anti-virus software vendor sets the following registry key:

Help Net Security reviewed Acunetix 11

Jan Reilink on 1 November 2017

Acunetix 11 Review by Help Net Security. Acunetix is one of the biggest players in the web security arena. The European-based company released the first version of their product back in 2005, and thousands of clients around the globe use it to analyze the security of their web applications. They recently unveiled Acunetix version 11, so Help Net Security decided to take it for a spin.

How to: Determine which .NET Framework versions are installed

Jan Reilink on 7 September 2017

Users can install and run multiple versions of the .NET Framework on their computers. When you develop or deploy your app, you might need to know which .NET Framework versions are installed on the user’s computer.

How to unzip a file in PowerShell

Jan Reilink on 30 August 2017

Unzipping a file on your PowerShell command line may come in handy sometimes, even on your Windows 10 or Windows 8.1 workstation. All that is required is PowerShell and the .NET 4.5 Framework.

Restore single MySQL table from a full mysqldump backup file

Jan Reilink on 21 August 2017

If you need to restore a single table from a full MySQL backup, you may find yourself wondering “how do I do that?”. There are a few steps required, I outline them here for you to restore the contents of just one table back into the database from the mysqldump using Bash.