Category: Useful tools

Simple Mail Testing

Insert a witty comment about how it’s been so long since my last post. In my travels, I came across a handy file which I felt was share-worthy. Have you ever had a need to quickly test an SMTP  connection via telnet or netcat? I have. If you don’t have a file like this already, …

Continue reading

PagerDuty Review

I’m always looking for ways to improve both internal and external services and tools because I believe that to stagnate is bad. Just because what we have works, doesn’t mean we can’t make it better. If we can make it better in a cost-effective way, why aren’t we doing that? It is in that vein …

Continue reading

Foreman on Debian – Install issues

A few weeks ago I noticed that as a result of an upgrade, puppet-dashboard had removed itself from the system it ran on. No big deal, I wasn’t really using it and it put a number of more important packages on the removal list if I made the required changes to keep it. Since then I’ve …

Continue reading

Diagnosing Internet Issues, Part Two

Last week we covered traceroutes, and why you should gather data on both the forward path and the reverse path. This week we are looking at MTR, why you should use it, and how to interpret the results. ‘traceroute’ is a very handy tool, and it exists on most operating systems. If it isn’t there …

Continue reading

Test Case Web

[notice]FAIR WARNING: At time of writing, this software hadn’t been fully tested. During the tests I have found a large number of SQL injection issues with this code that I have patched on my system, and will continue to patch as I check over the package. In the next few days I’ll make a useful …

Continue reading

Moving MySQL Users and Databases

Occasionally, as part of my day-to-day duties, we migrate users from one shared hosting server to another. In general we use the cPanel/WHM “Transfer account” feature. On occasion, this doesn’t work quite right and manual interventions must be made. When the Transfer Account feature breaks a user account, it’s annoying. Usually most of the transfer …

Continue reading