Category Archives: Clippings

Clippings

Installing Canon Printer drivers on ARM Windows

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Guess what, the latest Microsoft Surface Pro X, isn’t all that ‘Pro’ friendly with it’s ARM based processor that it seems, nobody has a printer driver for. Who knows why Microsoft haven’t been able to add a 4G chip without having to replace the entire processor with a ARM chip. Lenovo and Dell (and probably HP) have been offering 3G/4G connectivity in their business ranges for years.

Rant over, thankfully a handful of generic priter drivers come in the box which might get you out in a pinch.

1) Go to ‘Printers & Scanners’ under Settings.

2) Click on Add a new Printer and wait, after a while a little message pops up saying ‘The printer that I want isn’t listed’

3) The old Add Printer dialogue appears. Select the last option ‘Add a local printer….’

4) Create a new port – Standard TCP/IP port

5) Use the Machines IP address. Untick the ‘Query the printer’ box.

6) Select the ‘Microsoft PCL6’ driver from the list.7) Print off a test page. It seems to work.

Obviously, you lose all the amazing extra bits from the driver, but for basic stuff, it’s good.

Clippings

Nginx proxy_redirect

1 Comment 
The information you’re about to submit is not secure

Because the site is using a connection that’s not completely secure, your information will be visible to others.

Chrome v86 started warning users about insecure forms. An odd configuration where Nginx was sitting in front of an IIS box was throwing the warning to users, seemingly because IIS wasn’t aware of the SSL layer that Nginx was putting on.

The solution. Adding the following line into the location block in Nginx.

proxy_redirect http://$host/ https://$host/;

No more warnings and now the browser stays inside of https land. Excellent.

By using the $host variable, instead of the actual hostname it allows this to be used inside of a snippet and used across multiple websites without having to change anything.

Clippings

Limesurvey Admin 500 Internal Server Error

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Recently I moved a LimeSurvey instance from one server to another, unfortunately, upon doing this I was suddenly unable to login to the admin panel.
The login screen would appear, but upon trying to login, the browser just sat there with a spinning “thinking” wheel.

After sometime the following would appear on the screen:

Request Timeout
This request takes too long to process, it is timed out by the server. If it should not be timed out, please contact administrator of this web site to increase ‘Connection Timeout’.

I tried enabling Debugging mode, but nothing was logged.
After some googling, I found this thread followed by this thread

The solution
It turns out that Limesurvey is trying to ‘call’ home in the background to see if there is an update. For whatever reason, this request is failing.
To stop it from doing this, it’s possible to edit the config.php file (/application/config/config.php)
And under the section:

'config'=>array(
// debug: Set this to 1 if you are looking for errors. If you still get no errors after enabling this
// then please check your error-logs - either in your hosting provider admin panel or in some /logs directory
// on your webspace.
// LimeSurvey developers: Set this to 2 to additionally display STRICT PHP error messages and get full access to standard templates
'debug'=>0,
'debugsql'=>0, // Set this to 1 to enanble sql logging, only active when debug = 2
// Update default LimeSurvey config here
)

And add a line to the bottom there ‘updatable’ => false,:


'config'=>array(
// debug: Set this to 1 if you are looking for errors. If you still get no errors after enabling this
// then please check your error-logs - either in your hosting provider admin panel or in some /logs directory
// on your webspace.
// LimeSurvey developers: Set this to 2 to additionally display STRICT PHP error messages and get full access to standard templates
'debug'=>0,
'debugsql'=>0, // Set this to 1 to enanble sql logging, only active when debug = 2
// Update default LimeSurvey config here
'updatable' => false,
)

Success!
I use Installatron inside of Cpanel to manage updates, so I’m ok with disabling updates here.

Environment Info:
LimeSurvey: 2.72.3+171020
Cpanel with
PHP 7
Litespeed

Clippings

Zato MySQL Connection with UTF-8

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Today this error appeared in an Zato Service:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u2019' in position 1: ordinal not in range(256)

I turns out that SQLAlchemy defaults to latin-1 encoding instead of UTF-8 for MySQL connections.

Thanks to Andrea on a Zato Thread here: https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/pipermail/zato-discuss/2015-November/001443.html points out that we can just add
dbname?charset=utf8 in the WebUI.

While not intuitive, it does work.
I added it, had the service try the action again and all was well in the world again.

Clippings

SuiteCRM / SugarCRM Rest API 500 Error get_entry_list

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I stumbled upon this problem today when trying out the SuiteCRM Rest API.
When searching for an account by it’s name I was using a search like this:

"name = 'Andrew'"

The API was returning a 500 error.
I dug into the suitecrm.log and found this:

where (name = 'Andrew') AND accounts.deleted=0: MySQL error 1052: Column 'name' in where clause is ambiguous

It seems that because of the joins, it can’t work out which ‘name’ we are talking about. Lets add the table name in and tada it works:

"accounts.name = 'Andrew'"

Clippings

Zato and Pandas (strange combination I know)

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I’ve been working with Zato for a project and I’m getting some random text out of a HTTP request that looks like a CSV file, so the easiest way I know how to deal with this CSV data is with Pandas, then I could process it enough and clean it up to hand back to Zato.

But Zato doesn’t ship with Pandas….
(TL;DR at the bottom of the post)

In theory this should work:

/opt/zato/2.0.7/bin/pip install pandas

But then I get the error when I do the following:

/opt/zato/2.0.7/bin/python
>>> import pandas as pd
File "/opt/zato/current/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pandas/__init__.py", line 19, in
"Missing required dependencies {0}".format(missing_dependencies))
ImportError: Missing required dependencies ['pytz', 'dateutil']

No luck.

After trying pip install pytz and pip install –upgrade pytz
I get this error:

Installing collected packages: pytz
Found existing installation: pytz 2014.4
Cannot remove entries from nonexistent file /opt/zato/2.0.7/eggs/easy-install.pth

But this does work:

/opt/zato/2.0.7/bin/easy_install --upgrade pytz

Now to fix dateutil.

easy_install --upgrade python-dateutil

Let’s try it again:

/opt/zato/2.0.7/bin/python
>>> import pandas as pd
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
File "/opt/zato/current/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pandas/__init__.py", line 23, in
from pandas.compat.numpy import *
File "/opt/zato/current/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pandas/compat/__init__.py", line 361, in
from dateutil import parser as _date_parser
File "/opt/zato/current/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/python_dateutil-2.6.0-py2.7.egg/dateutil/parser.py", line 40, in
from six import text_type, binary_type, integer_types
ImportError: No module named six

Bummer!


easy_install six

And for a final test:

/opt/zato/2.0.7/bin/python
>>> import pandas as pd
>>>

Yay, it’s working. Hopefully, nothing in Zato has broken…

TL;DR:


/opt/zato/2.0.7/bin/easy_install pandas
/opt/zato/2.0.7/bin/easy_install --upgrade pytz
/opt/zato/2.0.7/bin/easy_install --upgrade pytz
/opt/zato/2.0.7/bin/easy_install six

UPDATE:
(I have not tested this)
It might work better to use buildout to make this work see this comment here:

https://forum.zato.io/t/what-is-the-canonical-way-to-add-extra-python-packages-to-my-zato-server/580?source_topic_id=586

There is another way, that of updating versions.cfg and buildout.cfg files but if you are more familiar with pip than buildout then pip install package-name is perfectly fine.

However, if a dependency is not on PyPI nor any other package index (such as your own internal one) then you can place individual Python modules in zato_extra_paths too.

Clippings

Yii CGridView Default Order / Yii ActiveRecord Default Sort

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Disclaimer, I know next to nothing about Yii….

Today I had an issue with a Yii App and it’s default admin CRUD tables, and sorting fields, well everything that listed a record from the database was in the order it was inserted into the database and not in a human friendly alphabetical order.

It turns out it’s really easy to set a default so that everything that uses the Model, comes out in a sorted way. (Note for larger things, you probably don’t want every single query that hits the DB getting sorted, so you’d probably only apply the sorting as required, but for small things, this shouldn’t be an issue).

For this example I have a Model called ‘Contacts’.

Open up your model (mine is: /models/Contacts.php)

Above the function ‘ public static function model($className=__CLASS__)’

Add the following function (if it’s not present)


/*
* Let's Setup some defaults!
*/
public function defaultScope()
{
return array(
'order' => 'FirstName'
);
}

In the array of ‘order’ change the value to the name of the column that you want to sort by, for my example it was ‘FirstName’.

Save, upload, test, enjoy.

Like I said at the start, I know nothing about Yii, had I, I probably wouldn’t have spent 20 minutes googling it.

Resources: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/database.ar#default-scope

Clippings

Windows 10 and iTunes There was an error connecting to the Apple ID server

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Recently after a fresh install of Windows 10, I tired to reinstall iTunes.

While trying to authorize my computer for my iPhone Apps I got the following error:

“There was an error connecting to the Apple ID server”

Several reboots later, still no joy. I also noticed that I couldn’t connect to the iTunes store.

I found the following helps?

  1. Right click on the Windows Start Menu Icon and select ‘Command Prompt (Admin)’
  2. Type the following into the command prompt box followed by enter:
    netsh winsock reset
  3. Reboot the computer

How this works: I’m not overly sure why it effects iTunes, but it’s similar to clearing the cache in your browser, just at a network level.

Hopefully this helps someone else.

Reference: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7192420?start=0&tstart=0

Clippings

LG-Nortel LDK-300 Phone not allowed to call external numbers

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I had a strange phone extension that after lifting the handset, pressing 0 to the get the outside line and dialing the 2nd digit a message on the screen would appear ‘ACCESS DENY’.

It turns out it was a COS issue.

To fix it:

  • Lift the handset and then press ‘TRANS/PGM’
  • Then select option ‘[2] COS / SMS SERVICE’
  • Then select option ‘[2] COS RESTORE’
  • I had ‘ENTER CURRENT PASSWORD’ appear on the screen. How to find that is listed below
  • Enter the password for the station and press the ‘HOLD / SAVE’ button.
  • ‘PROGAM’ Appears on the screen, hang up

To piss off the next person:

  • Lift the handset and then press ‘TRANS/PGM’
  • Then select option ‘[2] COS / SMS SERVICE’
  • Then select option ‘[1] COS DOWN’
  • ‘PROGAM’ Appears on the screen, hang up

How to find out the station password:

In LDK PCADMIN, the ‘Authorization Code Table (PGM227)’ seems to hold all the station passwords. It has 4 columns, Index, Value (this is the password), Day COS, Night COS.
The Index number, appears to line up with the Port number found in the Numbering Plan (PGM104-109).
By comparing the Station number and it’s port number in the Numbering Plan, and using that port number to match up with the index number in Authorization Code Table, I was able to work out the password (sounds complex, but easier when you attempt it).

This system was running the ‘Hotel’ software for the LG-Nortel LDK-300, I would assume that it would be the same in the LDK-130 (if it has a hotel software). I don’t think that the COS features are part of the standard non ‘Hotel’ software. I’m not sure.

Clippings

Scripting a reboot of a Billion Router over Telnet

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Sometimes with older hardware and ADSL connections, you just need to do a reboot every now and then. Newer modems let you do this, but the Billion one I had the joy of playing with today, didn’t.

Lets turn to a simple script running on a Linux box on the same subnet.
Turns out using ‘expect’ you can script a Telnet session. (I know, Telnet isn’t ideal). This could be used across switches, routers, modems, other random boxes that require a telnet interface.

Create a File

nano modem-reboot.sh

Add the code. You’ll need to change the “expect” values as necessary

#!/usr/bin/expect
#If it all goes pear shaped the script will timeout after 20 seconds.
set timeout 20
#First argument is assigned to the variable name
set name [lindex $argv 0]
#Second argument is assigned to the variable user
set user [lindex $argv 1]
#Third argument is assigned to the variable password
set password [lindex $argv 2]
#This spawns the telnet program and connects it to the variable name
spawn telnet $name
#The script expects login
expect "Login:"
#The script sends the user variable
send "$user\r"
#The script expects Password
expect "Password:"
#The script sends the password variable
send "$password\r"
#This hands control of the keyboard over two you (Nice expect feature!)
#interact
#Reboot
expect "admin>"
# Change the following value to whatever your devices reboot command is.
send "system restart\r"

Finally make the file executable


chmod +x modem-reboot.sh

Test it.

Help it doesn’t work.
Under a stock standard Ubuntu 14.04 install I had to add the ‘expect’ package

sudo apt-get install expect

Thanks to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7013137/automating-telnet-session-using-bash-scripts for the assistance and starting point of the script.