Norse Technologies Knowledge Base Free Knowledge Articles

Many thanks to Jon Lee at jonlee.ca for this excellent procedure allowing for the automtic login of a session using SSH and puTTY.exe terminal emulator. You da man!

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From his site:

As many web developers can attest to, logging into your server through SSH (Secure Shell) is one of the more common day-to-day tasks (you can even use it as a secure tunnel for your traffic). It only makes sense to automate this process which in turn can save many many keystrokes.

This how-to is written with PuTTY and Windows in mind and requires several other tools that are available from PuTTY’s website. So from their download page, make sure you have these files:

• PuTTY (putty.exe)
• PuTTYgen (puttygen.exe)

Then to automate SSH login, do the following:

1. Run PuTTYgen.
2. Select SSH-2 DSA as the Type of Key to generate.
3. Click generate and move your mouse around to generate randomness.
4. Click “Save Private Key” and save it somewhere on your computer.
5. Copy the entire content inside the box to your clipboard (this is your generated public key).
6. Login to your SSH server.
7. Create the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys containing the generated public key (from step 3) on a single line.
8. Make this file readable (chmod 755).
9. Then open up PuTTY and navigate to Connection->Data and fill in the auto-login username.
10. Navigate to Connection->SSH->Auth and under Private-key, browse to the file you had saved earlier on your computer.

That’s it! Now you can try logging in to your SSH server and it should login automatically. If it works, make sure you save your session so you don’t have to repeat these steps every time!

Hopefully these steps work for everyone! Let me know if there are any problems.

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Had some problems with a CentOS5 server not accepting keys… found that this server was being finicky for some reason, and used this article on how to generate the keys on the Linux server, and then import the public key to the client Windows box. To make it automatically login simply do not enter any passphrase. This is probably a huge security risk or something like that, but if you’re using it on a secured LAN then perhaps it’s ok.

Posted under Linux, Network

The following is totally copied from myfixes.com excellent article.

This article applies to the following type of errors:

Resolution:

A. Boot the system into the Recovery Console and CHKDSK

B. Perform the System Restore
Inside the Recovery Console type the following commands to change the directory to the system restore directory:

If you get an Access Denied error:click here
If you don’t get an Access Denied error :

If there is no _resto~1 folder or if there are no restore points inside it:click here

If the _resto~1 folder exists, inside it there are several folders named RP1, RP2. These are restore points. RP1 is the oldest restore point. You can use

to view what RP folders are available. If no restore points are available click here. Otherwise choose the most convenient RP folder. Supposing we have RP3 available let’s type in:

Change the directory to snapshot:

Restore the main registry branches. If you are being asked if you want to overwrite type in y to agree.

Type exit to reboot the system. Start the computer normally

Based on:
The support.microsoft.com article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q307545&ID=KB;EN-US;Q307545

The icompute.info article:
http://www.icompute.info/System_restore_from_xp_cd.htm

Posted under Microsoft

In a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet cell one can use a custom function to effectively grab all test after the final (last) occurrence of a particular character or string. This is accomplished by simply creating a Custom Function and then using that function in a cell formula. Following is the code and instructions for how to create and then implement the function.


Function PullAfterLast(rCell As Range, strLast As String)
PullAfterLast = Mid(rCell, InStrRev(rCell, strLast) + 1, 256)
End Function


1. Highlight the above code, and copy it to the clipboard by pressing CTRL-C, or by right-clicking on the text and on the resulting popup window left-clicking on Copy.
2. Open Microsoft Excel (or proceed to step 2 if you prefer to open Excel by clicking  the desired existing .xls file directly.).
3. Open the workbook you wish to use the function with, or create a new workbook.
4. Open the Visual Basic Editor window by pressing ALT-F11 on the keyboard, or clicking Tools > Macros > Visual Basic Editor
5. Insert a new module by right-clicking on ThisWorkbook > Insert > Module or on the toolbar clicking Insert > Module
6. Paste the clipboard contents (which is the code above this numbered procedure) into the code window by pressing CTRL-V, or by right-clicking in the code window and on the popup menu clicking on Paste, or by clicking the menu toolbar on Edit and clicking on Paste.
7. Close the Visual Basic Editor by presing CTRL-Q, or by clicking File on the menu toolbar and then clicking Close and Return to Microsoft Excel.

The custom user defined function is now available to be used in the formulas of cells. To use it, the following syntax format is used in the cell’s formula:

=PullAfterLast(A1,"yourstring")

Of course, replace yourstring with the appropriate character or string.

This info was combined from ozgrid.com article about how to make custom functions easily, and vertex42.com article where Dave Hawley gave the universe this function’s code, many thanks!

Posted under Excel, Microsoft, Office

When a website user makes a search with WordPress,  the search results typically are shown using the search.php template file. If one chooses to do so, these results can incluse an automatically “grabbed” image thumbnail generated by the images contained in the image. Posts with no images can show a default generic image instead. And this can all be done using the Get-The-Image plugin and perhaps a bit of code tweaking.

<div style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 20px;">
<div style="float: left; width: 150px; height: 150px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php if ( function_exists( 'get_the_image' ) ) { get_the_image('width=150&height=150&image_scan=true&default_image=http://yoursite.com/default.jpg' ); } ?></a></div>
<div>
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> by <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?><br />
<p>Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?>  <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?></p>
</div>
</div>


Insert this snippet, written by mercime ar wordpress.org into your loop, typically right after the beginning while-have-posts loop.

Posted under WebDev, WordPress

Thanks to Mike Dent’s efforts and OTRS, we now know how a CSV file can be imported into the MySQL database directly. Here is the sample code:

mysql> load data infile '/tmp/otrs_test.txt' into table customer_user
fields terminated by '\t' lines terminated by '\r' (first_name,
last_name, address, postcode, phone1, email, customer_id, valid_id,
create_time, create_by, change_time, change_by, login);

Make sure to import all the required fields (that is, the ones that the database requires, see the table schema for details, >show table x;)

Posted under Freeware, MySQL, WebDev

From the MySQL website:

For input, if the FIELDS ESCAPED BY character is not empty, occurrences of that character are stripped and the following character is taken literally as part of a field value. Some two-character sequences that are exceptions, where the first character is the escape character. These sequences are shown in the following table (using “\” for the escape character). The rules for NULL handling are described later in this section.

\0	An ASCII NUL (0x00) character
\b	A backspace character
\n	A newline (linefeed) character
\r	A carriage return character
\t	A tab character.
\Z	ASCII 26 (Control-Z)
\N	NULL

For more information about “\”-escape syntax, see Section 8.1, “Literal Values”.

Posted under Freeware, MySQL

The pesky carraige return and new line characters, while providing a way to present text for human viewing, are not always desirable when working in a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org.

In Excel, a bit of code provided by Ivan Moala on mrexcel.com, works wonders. Here is the code:


'Created by Chip Pearson
'Cleans up data by removing tabs and carriage returns in worksheet cells.
Sub CleanUp()
Dim TheCell As Range
For Each TheCell In ActiveSheet.UsedRange
With TheCell
If .HasFormula = False Then
.Value = Application.WorksheetFunction.Clean(.Value)
End If
End With
Next TheCell
End Sub


Here’s how to use it:

• In Excel click Tools > Macro > Visual Basic Editor (or just hit Alt-F11)
• In the top-left pane under the Project heading, double-click the name of the sheet you want to strip all the newlines and carriage returns from.
• In the window that pops up, paste the code above into the empty box under where you see General and Declarations.
• Run the macro by clicking the “play” button above, or hit F5

Warning: make a backup copy of your Excel workbook before performing the above procedure.

Posted under Excel, Microsoft, Uncategorized

In modern Microsoft Windows operating systems and all Unix / Linux systems the system clock time can be set automatically. The computer will connect to a special server on the Internet called a Network Time Protocol server, and get the current universal time, and then adjust it according to the local time zone on the computer. It keeps the computer clock very accurate and corrects drift before it can become much of a problem.

We recommend using a reliable server: pool.ntp.org

A wonderful group of generous folks provide this extremely reliable cluster of computers for us all to use, free of charge. Thank you NTP Pool Project and all the participants!

Posted under Freeware, Linux, WebDev

When logged in to the MySQL server using the command line interface (CLI) the  generated errors on the previously run command.

mysql> show warnings;

Thanks to Trevor Nichols and www.issociate.de

Posted under Freeware, MySQL

Using conditional formatting one may easily show duplicate values in any chosen range of data. Find all duplicate values, and highlight any values that appear more than once.

=COUNTIF(A:A,A2)>1

This is the meat, and here is how:

• Highlight the cell to work on.
• Click Format > Conditional Formatting
• Set Formula Is
• Enter the formula above, replacing the ranges as follows:
  • (A:A means that it will look inside the entire A range. Replace this with your own range, e.g. B3:B5 or CC:CC
  • ,A2) means to count how many times the value in A2 appears in the designated range. This needs to match the cell you are currently working on.
• Then set the format you want to see when the count of identical values existing in the range is greater than one. This value can be altered to a higher number in order to highlight cells that have more than two duplicates, e.g. change it to be >5 to highlight the cell when at least 5 cells have the same value as the current cell, including this cell itself.
• Copy the formula only to other cells in the range. To do this, copy the current cell, then Paste Special and choose Formulas and paste into the other cells in the range.

An excellent tutorial is at MREXCEL.COM, and thanks to that site for this knowledge and info.

Posted under Excel, Microsoft, Office