ASP and ASP.NET connection string examples for Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL

A connection string is sometimes a bit obscure. Do I need ODBC or OLE DB? When you need one and Google for it, you often find old ones that either don’t work at all anymore, or are not optimal. This article provides you with a couple of ASP.NET to SQL Server connection string examples, and as a bonus for ASP to MySQL too.

Start all stopped application pools that have Autostart set to true

Just a quicky: Start all stopped application pools in IIS that have the autostart property set to true. Easily with appcmd or the IISAppPool cmdlet that’s available in the IISAdministration PowerShell module. And here is how.

MySQL Connector/ODBC C# test script

Whenever you need to test your ASP.NET connection to your MySQL database, using ODBC, you can use the following C# test script. Currently it uses MySQL ODBC 8.0 Unicode Driver, but you can easily change the version used. As a bonus it prints some connection information and it requires an SSL connection to your MySQL database (SslMode=REQUIRED).

Working with file attributes in PowerShell

How to use the Windows PowerShell cmdlet Get-ItemProperty to work with file attributes.

Working with PowerShell’s Get-ItemProperty to get file attributes may boost your work productivity. It’s often easier to getting things done if you have a more generic way of doing something. Here is how to use Get-ItemProperty in PowerShell to perform and streamline day to day tasks like installing or updating software based on file versions.

Windows 10 and Windows Server quality updates

What’s next for Windows 10 and Windows Server quality updates

Microsoft’ll be bringing a new design for quality updates to the next major versions of Windows 10 and Windows Server, coming later this year, Maliha Qureshi writes. This design creates a compact update package for easier and faster deployment.

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

Connect to MySQL 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

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

Windows privilege escalation guide

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.”

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

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, WordPress and Drupal components. Here’s how to fix this code for PHP 7.1+.

Windows Server 2016 on Hyper-V stuck at stopping

… 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

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

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?

Important note about Windows Update KB4056892

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

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.

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How to: Determine which .NET Framework versions are installed

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.