Capi’s Corner

I have lost the install CD of my Novatel Merlin U740, an older PCMCIA UMTS card. As a consequence I got no “Mobilink Connection Manager” after installing Windows 7 on my notebook. Fortunately I found this guide by Novatel Wireless which explains how to connect using only on-board tools in Windows Vista, by setting up a dial-up connection. It still works in Windows 7. The important part is to set the APN as part of the driver’s initialization string.

The telephone number you have to set is *99#, which should be provider-independent.

The following settings are for yesss.at only:
Username: web
Passwort: web

Remember to set the APN as part of the driver’s connection string in Window’s “Device Manager” as described in the PDF.

Again, for yesss.at this is: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","web.yesss.at"

For this to work properly, the SIM must not have a PIN set, as otherwise the SIM will be locked and the dialer cannot dial out. For me this is ok, as it is a pre-paid card which can hardly be abused if it gets stolen, but your situation might be different, so please consider the security implications. (I suspect that it should be possible to unlock the SIM card somehow using the AT+CPIN=1234 command, but I did not research how to separate several initialization strings, as it did not work immediately.)

The solution works quite well for me, even under Windows 7. Disadvantage is that there is no way to tell the signal strength and exact mode of operation (despite the color-coded status led on the Merlin U740).

computer, hardware, sysadmin dial-up, howto, merlin u740, network, sysadmin, windows

I have several computers, one at the office (Windows Vista), one at home (Gentoo Linux), and one notebook (Windows XP). On most of them I want to share a common set of files, including letters and other documents, but also Miranda. This time I am going to tell you how I keep my shared data in sync using Unison, PuTTY, and OpenSSH, using a dedicated server as central hub.

(Note: this is a rather advisory level HOWTO, not a step-by-step, command-by-command tutorial. It might give you some ideas nevertheless.)

Read more…

internet, software, sysadmin howto, synchronization, unison

I am currently migrating my server configuration away from mod_php towards mod_fcgid (the successor of mod_fastcgi), as this allows me to use different users for executing scripts in different directories. I use this to have every hosted virtual domain using its own system user. This should (in theory) prevent one buggy application to take over all other hosted domains as well.

I though faced one problem: I could not get phpMyAdmin working and this was a requirement of one of my clients. phpMyAdmin kept popping up the authentication dialog over and over again when using HTTP Basic Authentication.

After searching some time, I noticed that, when using PHP in CGI mode, the authentication data is not passed over to the script by default. A FAQ entry of phpMyAdmin brought the solution to this issue: a ReWrite Rule was needed for the directory containing phpMyAdmin:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=REMOTE_USER:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]

Suddenly phpMyAdmin worked

internet, security, sysadmin apache, howto, mod_fcgid, mysql, phpmyadmin, security

By default, VMware Workstation 5.x use a memory mapped file for backing the RAM of the simulated machines. This eases the pressure on the system’s page file. If you host the virtual machine on an external drive, however, this can become a bottle neck, especially if the external device is slow (e.g. USB 1.1, flash, etc.).

As described in this VMware Knowledge Base Article, you can turn of VMWare’s behaviour to use a memory mapped file and force it to use the system’s paging mechanism instead. To do so, you just have to add

mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE

to your virtual machine’s configuration file (.vmx).

software configuration, external-device, faq, howto, optimization, performance, speed, tuning, usb, vmware

To force SSL on a given directory using .htaccess, use the following code. It requires mod_rewrite enabled in Apache. Adjust the path in the RewriteRule to match the full qualified URL of the HTTPS-domain.


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !443
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]


internet, security, sysadmin apache, config, howto, mod_rewrite, security