I am sure there are tons of Neverwinter Nights fans out there, for both the original and version 2.  If anyone is interested in tinkering with the tool set for Neverwinter Nights 2, here is a handy wuick reference for you.  Check it out …

You have heard me share information about the fiasco that Verizon created.  In case you haven’t heard, I’ll recap quickly.  In the name of fighting SPAM, Verizon decided that they would block ALL port 25 SMTP traffic on their network for all of their ISP customers.  That means that anyone and everyone that uses Verizon as their ISP (DSL, FIOS, Dial-up, etc) cannot use any third party mail server or service that is configured to use the industry standard port 25.  That’s just plain stupid, but I have complained about that already.

I was in a quandary with this one, or maybe a catch-22 is a better term.  If I didn’t do anything about this “problem” that Verizon created, then all the people that I host email services for that use Verizon as their ISP are now out of luck.  They can’t send mail through their (read: my) mail servers.  So, I can just change the port that sendmail listens on, right?  Yeah, I could, and then my Verizon tethered customers can send mail again … but, all my other customers that don’t use Verizon have to change their email client settings too, since they would still be sending through port 25.  OK, I didn’t want to go down that road.  I wanted to fix the problem with the least impact on everyone. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi there, how about a close cousin to yesterdays Visual Basic function?  In a previous post we showed you a function that will tell you whether or not a file does indeed exist.  Well, here is another similar function, but it tells you whether or not a directory exists.  This is another handy tool for all you code monkeys out there.  It works much the same way, check it out below:

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Here is a handy little tip (and function) for all you Visual Basic developers out there.  I use this quite often, it’s useful to see if whatever file you are working with or looking for exists before you start trying to access it.  So, here we have a nice little function you can drop into a module and call from anywhere when you need it.

(Need to do the same for a directory? That function is here!)

Check it out:

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OK folks, I came up with something helpful and I thought I would pass it on.  Recently I had a spam bot (or maybe a real person, who knows) join the forums.  Went right through all of the security controls and verifications.  Then, said user went about posting almost 500 porn posts all over my site’s forums.  Posting topics, posts, pics and embedded videos, it was really bad and I was really mad.  First off I banned the user, no problem.  I figured I would do that so I could keep relevant info like IP and email addresses rather than just deleting him.  Now I had the arduous task of removing all those damn posts and topics.

I do know that you can delete a user and tell SMF to also delete all of those users topics posts as well, but that hasn’t worked in the past so I did it on my own. Here is what I did.

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Here we go folks, I thought I would share a handy little script with you that I use to backup all of the databases on a particular Linux/UNIX server.  I do this by getting a list of the databases, and then using mysqldump to dump them all to a text file.  This seems to be the best way (short of replication) to get good clean backups of the data.  Toss it into a cron job and you can have it done automagically.  There isn’t anything yet to rotate files, but I might add that later.  Also, I am going to try and rewrite this in PERL so our Windows (and other OS’s that don’t have a shell like Bash) brethren can run this script as well.  For now though, it’s written for Bash but almost any shell would work I think.

OK, onto the script.  Read the rest of this entry »