Following up on my recent post about making a minimal VPN routing virtual machine to isolate obnoxious VPN clients, another problem you’ll run into if you have the need to connect to a whole lot of client networks is that the networks of different companies tend to overlap, either with your own or with eachother. […]
After it was requested multiple times on my post about using pfSense as a Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client, I finally found some time to document the setup I ended up with as a replacement, the purpose of which was to not clutter up the pfSense box. pfSense, after all, acts as the main company router […]
I write shell scripts. A lot of them. I automate everything with scripts. Many of these scripts need to have some notion of a state. The state needs to be persistent. How do we do that? And could we draw some retro flashback line character table borders while we’re at it? The problem If I […]
I was recently debugging a case where a customer’s installation was hanging due to a database lock. The issue turned out to be that the database was not set to a default transaction level of READ COMMITTED SNAPSHOT, which the product expects. Regardless, while troubleshooting the issue, I stumbled upon a very useful SQL query […]
Someone recently asked, in #bash on Freenode, how to find duplicate files with Bash. Several options were suggested, and the user ended up installing and running “fdupes“. However, this sort of thing should be reasonably easy to do using “find” and a few pipes. As a quick overview, what you want to achieve is to […]
I recently picked up a brand new vintage 2009 business targeted netbook, sealed in box – the Fujitsu Siemens Esprimo u9200 (fact sheet) (review => archive). At just short of 2KG (4.37 pounds) it’s rather bulky compared to today’s netbooks, but as a rather disposable piece of equipment for travel, which I’d be perfectly fine […]
No introduction here. Let’s get to it. Go to settings Add an external account Enter your existing external email address, e.g. “you@otherdomain.com” Select POP3 Enter your existing credentials The settings shown are for the Cathedral mail server – yours may be different. Contact your provider if you’re not sure. Choose to treat it as an […]
Sometimes, you just want things brutally simple and stupid. I was searching for how to do this, and stumbled upon this post on SQL Server Central. Turns out the query listed there doesn’t handle databases with weird names, containing version numbers with “.” in them, for instance. Thus, I modified it slightly, adding brackets and […]
To enable timing of your query: SET STATISTICS TIME ON Time statistics provides output like this in the “Messages” tab of SSMS after running a query: (127 row(s) affected) SQL Server Execution Times: CPU time = 0 ms, elapsed time = 42 ms. To show IO statistics: SET STATISTICS IO ON ..which provides stuff […]
If you right click a database in SSMS and select Tasks => Take Offline, you might find yourself staring at this dialog for hours, if there are active sessions running queries on your database. Here’s how to force it to go offline, rolling back any current transactions. Replace [dbname] with the name of your database. […]