Enable PHP fsockopen with CSF
Recently started some sites with Liquid Web hosting, everything going extremely well all around. There was one hiccup (at least for me) where PHP’s fsockopen was not working. At the time, I was trying to figure out why the Whois Lookup feature used by Blackhole Bad Bots was not working. Initial investigation revealed that fsockopen() external HTTP requests were getting blocked somewhere. Everything else worked, including making the requests via cURL. Continue reading »
CLI Forward-Reverse Lookup
In previous posts, I’ve explained how to verify identity of search engines and other bots, by looking up the host name and then doing a reverse lookup to cross-check the IP address. This is often referred to as a forward-reverse lookup, or something to that effect. The point is, there are plenty of free online tools available for performing forward-reverse IP/host lookups. And online tools are great, but it’s also possible to do forward/reverse lookups directly via the command line, […] Continue reading »
List All Files and Folders Recursively via Terminal
From time to time I have occasion to generate a list all WordPress files or similar. As I’m not an expert in Terminal, it took awhile to figure out the magic recipe.. now having collected some useful commands, I want to post ‘em for future reference. Continue reading »
Associate Any File with Windows Notepad in Five Seconds
In my article, Associate Extensionless Files with Notepad, I explain how to navigate the labyrinthine maze of Windows dialogue menus to assign Microsoft’s Notepad text editor as the opening application for files without extensions. In this post, I’ll show you how to associate any file type with any program (including Notepad) in less than five seconds. Ready? Don’t blink, you’ll miss it.. ;) Continue reading »
Monitoring Internet Activity for Windows and macOS
Monitoring your computer’s Internet activity is a powerful tool, enabling you to: keep an eye on background processes reveal viruses and other malware expose unauthorized access monitor running programs log process activity ..and much more. The best part? It’s super-easy. Here’s how I do it on Win XP: Open the command prompt and type “netstat -n 5 > scan.txt” After a minute or two (or any amount of time), press Ctrl+C to stop monitoring Type “scan.txt” to open the log […] Continue reading »
MySQL Magic: Find and Replace Data
Recently, I needed to find and replace all instances of “http://website” in the wp_comments table of the WordPress database. Fortunately, SQL provides a simple way to find and replace data with its wonderful UPDATE function. Continue reading »
Computer Flashback: Windows 98 Run Commands
Even with all the fancy-pants new features found in Windows XP and now Vista, Microsoft Windows 98 (Second Edition) remains our favorite Windows-flavored operating system. We love it so much, we still use it on one of our trusty laptops. Over the years, we have discovered several very useful functions available via the command line or even the “Run” prompt (Start → Run…). Anyway, without spending too much time researching or explaining these wonderful tools, we figured posting the information online may […] Continue reading »
Basic DOS Commands
DOS (Disk Operation System) is a tool which allows you to control the operation of the IBM PC. DOS is software which was written to control hardware. Here is a summary of some essential DOS commands. Continue reading »
