Jan 162019
 

telenet is an useful tool to test the network connection.

E.g. if you want to test is a web server is still online you will want to try something like this

telnet notnull.ro 80

If you are on Windows 10, by default the telnet command is not available, it has to be installed/enabled, you will get a message like

‘telnet’ is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Here are the steps to enable it

  1. Search for Command Prompt and run it as administrator , like in picture below
  2. In command prompt run next command

dism /online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:TelnetClient

Now the telnet command should work.

 Posted by at 10:44 PM
Oct 162015
 

Few days ago installed STEAM platform on my computer (Windows 10) , just wanted a play a game. The GUI was very very slowly. It took me few minutes just to create and enable an account. Then to browse and install the applications store was impossible. Thens searching on the net I’ve found different hints/solutions. The want that worked for me was to change the settings for Internet Options. Just go to ControlPanel->Network and Ineternet->Inernet Optins, and a popup will appear.  In this new popup select Connections tab and then LAN Settings. After that uncheck the option Automatically detect settings, like in the picture below. After doing this everything was fast, tens of times faster.

Set "Automatically detect settings" off

Set “Automatically detect settings” off

 Posted by at 6:51 PM
Aug 232013
 

Few days ago I’ve installed VirtualBox from Oracle on my windows7 machine because I needed a linux where to play with apache webserver.

The instalation was very easy (I assume that internet is available on the host system :D)

  1. Installed VirtualBox
  2. Created a guest machine for Debian
  3. Downloaded Debian Netinstall Image; it is a small CD image which allow ou to install Debian via network. Just google for debian netinst iso , and you should get the latest version.
  4. Tell to VirtualBox to boot first from the downloaded iso file, and “start” the guest machine.
  5. Machine boots and next steps are straightforward: select language, partition disk, select and install packages
  6. The guest machine will then download the needed packages from the internet and will be installed.

Then I made a login to the guest system and play a little with apache, browsing etc…

My expectation was I’ll be able to browse the guest apache from the host system.

It does not work by default installation :(… so, I had to read some docs 😀 .

The idea is that on default install the VirtualBox will create an network adapter of type NAT (Network Address Translation). This type of adapter will permit to the guest to browse om Internet via host IP; but it does not allow connections to the guest.

Just stop the guest operating system and in VirtualBox Manager go to Settings->Network and change the network adapter from NAT to Bridged Adapter like in next picture.

network_select_bridged

If you have more than one network adapter on your host system, be sure that in the same window you have selected the proper one. See Name: field, in my case the active one was the Wireless LAN the one that has internet access, so I’ve selected that one. Be sure that Cable connected checkbox is on.

No other settings are needed.

Click OK and restart your guest operating system.

If you are in a DHCP network (IPs allocated dynamic) do login on the guest operating system and run the ifconfig  command to see what IP was alocated. E.g in my case I got:

>ifconfig

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:d7:2d:94  
          inet addr:192.168.1.105  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::a00:27ff:fed7:2d94/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:51 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:75 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:14365 (14.0 KiB)  TX bytes:10874 (10.6 KiB)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:60 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:60 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:23077 (22.5 KiB)  TX bytes:23077 (22.5 KiB)

Then I just go to the host system and browse to http://192.168.1.105/ , and all was fine.

If you are not an a DHCP network (ou are using static IPs), you have to set also the IP on the guest system. The same ifconfig command needs to be used, and it will require root permissions.

More info and details about network adapters available on VirtualBox virtualmanchine cahn be found here http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html

Have fun!

Jul 282013
 

Today I wanted to install the alexa toolbar on my IE 10 , Windows 7 – 64bit.
But I get a message which said that my browser is v 10.* and the accepted versions are 6.0 through 9.* >

It is the first time in my life when a plugin complains that my browser is to new 😀

IE 10 to new for alexa.com toolbarThen I’ve installed alexa toolbar on my FireFox browser. Here I have other issue: there is a site https://filezilla-project.org/ reported as #9351 worldwide and as number #9742 in US. My expectation was that WW number to be greater than US one. But probable the people from alexa are counting in a different way 🙂

alexa_and_filezilla

Update January 2014
In the meantime the new version of Alexa toolbar is working on Internet Explorer 6.0 through 11.0.
Even more, now we have a toolbar extension also for Chrome.

What is still missing a toolbar extension for Android browsers.

Jun 252013
 

Few weeks ago I’ve decide that I have to start an experiment: to improve the page rank of my site on alexa.com.
I’ve started this experiment as a result of the SPAM comments that I receive, something like “affordable way to drive tons of traffic to your web page”.
So, I said: Let’s follow the advices and see what’s happen.
When I’ve started this experiment (21 May 2013) the alexa com rank of my site was around 21530000, there was not too much activity on my site (smaller number is better, mine was a huge one).
So, following the advices I’ve submitted my home page to sites which create mass backlinks, for free. After few days there results were visible: a disaster, my rank stared to decrease.
In a week the position number was increasing like hell.
Searching on the net I’ve noticed that if backlinks on low-quality sites, my page will get a kind of penality.
So, on 30 June 2013 I’ve started to change something:

  • I’ve started to add some good content on my site (this is also what I’m doing right now)
  • Add backlinks to my own site as comments on different blogs, comments manually added (no bots) and they have to really comment what is written on the article
  • Start to create sitemap of my site and submit it to search engines

After two more days, when my page rank starts to improve.
See bellow the graph with the “rise and fall of my rank page” (or better: fall and rise… )

notnull.ro alexa rank

I’ll try on the future to keep track of the page rank, daily if it’s possible, eventually to add on this article some events: “when” I’ve did “what” to improve my position

So, the short story is:

  • mass backlinks generation is a bad thing, it can only hurts
  • write some useful content and share with the others
  • submit your simemap for indexing to search engines
Jun 172013
 

Few days ago a friend asked me for help: after installing some wordpress plugin, the pages refuse to load.
The Internet Explorer browser seems to do some work but the page never success to load.
So, I’ve try to use a different browser: Firefox.
It seems to work in the same way (page never loaded), but in the end I got a message like this: “Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.”
Hmm… that seems to be really strange, it seems to be Redirect HTTP response/header but we are nor sure… yet.
So, I’ve remember that there are some good command line tools like “curl” or “wget” that can tell me more about a page.
At that moment I was on a windows machine, and having cygwin environment installed, and fortunately the wget was already installed.
Cygwin is a unix like environment that can be installed on a windows machine.
Install this and you will get almost all the scripting languages available on a unix machine: perl, python, tcl, php, etc.
Now back to wget… running “wget –help” was easy to identify a wget switch/argument “-S”, it says:
-S, --server-response print server response.
So I’ve just used something like “wget -S http://www.example.com/a_page” and I’ve notice the problem: that page is sending back a 301 Redirect to himself, a kind of never eneding loop.
E.g. If it would be my web host, I would have something like

$ wget -S http://www.notnull.ro/log/
--2013-06-17 22:57:15-- http://www.notnull.ro/log/
Resolving www.notnull.ro (www.notnull.ro)... 176.9.70.183
Connecting to www.notnull.ro (www.notnull.ro)|176.9.70.183|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:59:01 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.16
Location: http://www.notnull.ro/log/
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 0
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Location: http://www.notnull.ro/log/ [following]
--2013-06-17 22:57:16-- http://www.notnull.ro/log/
Resolving www.notnull.ro (www.notnull.ro)... 176.9.70.183
Reusing existing connection to notnull.ro:80.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:59:01 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.16
Location: http://www.notnull.ro/log/
... and so on

As you probable already noticed the page http://www.notnull.ro/log/ is redirecting to http://www.notnull.ro/log/ , which is redirecting to http://www.notnull.ro/log/, which…

You can use the same technique if you play with the Rewrite Rules from Apache webserver. They are really powerful, but also dangerous. You may get in unwanted redirection, and o trace all this you may use the wget to retrieve all the redirection done.

Jun 072013
 

Firefox has become very slow. It takes too much time to load any page. Google mail page almost impossible to load. Not talking about flash based pages/games ; they never loaded in teh last couple of weeks.
I was trying for days to fix the problem. The only working solution seems to be a reset of your Firefox profile. See here how to do it.
You have to know that doing this you will lose all your Firefox settings and personal information:

  • Cookies
  • Installed Extensions
  • Bookmarks
  • Browse History

But at least when reset profile is done the old profile data are saved in a folder named “Old Firefox Data”, you can later still import some things from there.

It will work for a while, anyhow in the end most likely you will need to reinstall the operating system or to buy a faster/newer CPU. Usually those problems are generated by weak CPU/hardware.

 Posted by at 8:39 PM