Sysadmins of the North

Microsoft Deployment Workbench: silent installation of various applications

Silent installation command-line arguments to install and deploy applicatoins using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT). Install programs like 7-Zip, Windows Update Agent, IIS Manager and Microsoft Office silently and unattended.

By Jan Reilink 23/03/2012Windows Server

WordPress

Clean up WordPress post revisions

Every time you write or edit a WordPress post, WordPress saves the change as a post revision. As you might expect, this fills up your database with a huge amount of unneeded post revisions and information. This uses space which should be free space, the MySQL database becomes bloated. You can clean up these WordPress post revisions quite easily

By Jan Reilink 14/01/2012WordPress

Windows Server

“System.Web.HttpException (0x80004005): The URL-encoded form data is not valid.” error after MS11-100

"HttpException (0x80004005): The URL-encoded form data is not valid." is an error that might occur after applying MS11-100 out-of-band security update for ASP.NET. Here is how to fix this er

By Jan Reilink 03/01/2012Windows Server

Windows Server

How to use .htaccess files on Windows Server IIS

In this post I'll provide you with some useful .htaccess URL rewrite examples. For Windows Server IIS.

By Jan Reilink 28/12/2011Windows Server

Windows Server

Start all stopped application pools in IIS 6.0

How to stop and start application pools using VBScript and ADSI in Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0. Iterate with vbscript and ADSI through the IIS 6.0 metabase AppPool objects, find out their .State value and start an AppPool if its state isn't running.

By Jan Reilink 28/12/2011Windows Server

Windows Server

WCF Service error: “This collection already contains an address with scheme http.”

"This collection already contains an address with scheme http. There can be at most one address per scheme in this collection." is a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) error message indicating you are trying to add an already existing binding. By default the web service listens to all in IIS configured host headers. A host header is the website address, for example example.com and www.example.com. If this is not correctly added to the web.config file, the following error is thrown

By Jan Reilink 27/12/2011Windows Server

Umbraco

Umbraco CMS admin password reset

If you forgot your Umbraco admin password, use the following SQL query to reset your Umbraco admin password in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or MySQL

By Jan Reilink 17/11/2011Umbraco

Code base

MySQL query caching using PHP/Zend_Cache

By using the Cache.php PHP class of the Zend Framework, you can relatively easy cache MySQL query results to disk. This ensures faster consecutive results and speeds up execution. In this context, caching means: execute a MySQL query once and save the result in a temporary file. For every time that same query is executed, you can simply use the result stored in your disk cache file, as long as the database hasn't changed. Often it is faster to save this on the web server than having it to redo the query every time.

By Jan Reilink 14/11/2011Code base

Windows Server

Failed Request Tracing error LOG FILE MAX SIZE TRUNCATE

Failed Request Tracing (FREB) error LOG FILE MAX SIZE TRUNCATE. The maximum size of an FREB log file, in IIS 7+, is 512 KB per default. Once that size is reached, the log file is cut off (truncated) and a message LOG_FILE_MAX_SIZE_TRUNCATE is logged. Use AppCmd.exe to increase the maximum size for failed request logs.

By Jan Reilink 10/11/2011Windows Server

GNU Linux

Check IP address blacklist status in Bash

Bash script to check an IP address reputation status in several blacklists. I've added HttpBl as backlist and an API key is required for this list. Using this script in Bash you can quickly test if an IP address is blacklisted.

By Jan Reilink 14/10/2011GNU Linux

IIS 10 Module Mappings for *.php handler

Windows Server

PHP on IIS: No input file specified.

Here is how to resolve the no input file specified error with PHP and IIS. When you host your PHP website on Windows Server IIS, you may receive an "No input file specified" error message, when a HTTP request is made to non-existing .php files. When this happens you probably have no Request Restrictions configured in IIS' PHP handler set

By Jan Reilink 30/09/2011Windows Server

Windows Server

“Forensic Log Parsing with Microsoft’s LogParser”

Just stumbled upon: Forensic Log Parsing with Microsoft's LogParser. Log parser is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows® operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory®.

By Jan Reilink 25/08/2011Windows Server

Web application security

7 Snippets to use .htaccess as a Web Application Firewall

Here are 7 .htaccess snippets for you to secure your website, by using .htaccess as a kWeb Application Firewall (WAF). You can use this information to block exploits and rogue HTTP requests on your website.

By Jan Reilink 03/08/2011Web application security

Windows Server

Delete undeletable files from NTFS file system

Sometimes you cannot delete files on an NTFS file system, for example if the file contains a space at the beginning or end, or has a reserved name. Deleting the file gives an error: "The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.". Here's how to fix it: use "internal" commands.

By Jan Reilink 12/01/2010Windows Server

Windows Server

IIS 6.0 Adsutil.vbs server name command line parameter

Adsutil.vbs is a versatile and useful tool to administer IIS 6.0 servers, and everyone knows it of course. But, did you know there is a remote server command line parameter? With this you can use Adsutil.vbs on remote IIS servers. The parameter is: -s.

By Jan Reilink 12/01/2010Windows Server

Sysadmins of the North

Disable ECDH public server param reuse in Windows Server IIS

Create strong passwords in Windows

Install IIS in Windows 11 using PowerShell

Microsoft Deployment Workbench: silent installation of various applications

Clean up WordPress post revisions

“System.Web.HttpException (0x80004005): The URL-encoded form data is not valid.” error after MS11-100

How to use .htaccess files on Windows Server IIS

Start all stopped application pools in IIS 6.0

WCF Service error: “This collection already contains an address with scheme http.”

Umbraco CMS admin password reset

MySQL query caching using PHP/Zend_Cache

Failed Request Tracing error LOG FILE MAX SIZE TRUNCATE

Check IP address blacklist status in Bash

PHP on IIS: No input file specified.

“Forensic Log Parsing with Microsoft’s LogParser”

7 Snippets to use .htaccess as a Web Application Firewall

Delete undeletable files from NTFS file system

IIS 6.0 Adsutil.vbs server name command line parameter

Windows Server

Web applications

PowerShell