System Administration

Disable zoom with mouse wheel in Firefox

May 3, 2022 No Comments

Open Firefox.
In the address bar type in about:config and press Enter.
Click I’ll be careful, I promise.
Type mousewheel.with_control.action in the Search bar at the top of the about:config page.
Double-click mousewheel.with_control.action from the Preference Name column.
Enter the number 0 in the dialog box.
Click OK.

In order to disable multi-touch pinch zoom-in and zoom-out repeat the procedure as previous one and set:

browser.gesture.pinch.in & browser.gesture.pinch.out to false.
Alternatively you could try setting zoom.maxPercent & zoom.minPercent to 100 …

System Administration

Create self-signed SSL using OpenSsl

May 2, 2022 No Comments

Download OpenSsl installer first:
https://slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html

Generate private key first:
[YOUR_OPENSSL_BIN_PATH]\openssl.exe genrsa -out [YOUR_OUTPUT_PATH]\YourDomain.com.key 2048

Generate CSR request (set all data but set at the end empty password and company name):
[YOUR_OPENSSL_BIN_PATH]\openssl.exe req -new -nodes -key [YOUR_OUTPUT_PATH]\YourDomain.com.key -out d:\Utils\Certificates\YourDomain.com.csr

Generate certificate that is valid 10 years, or 3652 days
[YOUR_OPENSSL_BIN_PATH]\openssl.exe x509 -req -days 3652 -in [YOUR_OUTPUT_PATH]\YourDomain.com.csr -signkey [YOUR_OUTPUT_PATH]\YourDomain.com.key -out [YOUR_OUTPUT_PATH]\YourDomain.com.cert

Set port 995 for incoming email and port 465 for outgoing email – put them into firewall (Inbound and Outbound rules) in Advanced Firewall settings

System Administration

Solving PHPMailer and GMail connection failed issue

November 28, 2017 No Comments

Strange behaviour – it just stopped working 10 days ago and after a long search found a solution in specifying additional parameters in SSL connection, so working example should be like this:

try 
{
  $mail = new PHPMailer();
  $mail->IsSMTP();
  $mail->SMTPDebug = 2;
  $mail->SMTPAuth = true;
  $mail->SMTPSecure = 'ssl';
  $mail->SMTPOptions = array
  (
    'ssl' => array
    (
      'verify_peer' => false,
      'verify_peer_name' => false,
      'allow_self_signed' => true
    )
  );
  $mail->Host = "smtp.gmail.com";
  $mail->Port = 465;
  $mail->IsHTML(true);
  $mail->Username = GOOGLE_SMTP_USERNAME;
  $mail->Password = GOOGLE_SMTP_PASSWORD;
  $mail->SetFrom(SMTP_USERNAME);
  $mail->Subject = "Test";
  $mail->Body = "hello";
  $mail->AddAddress(YOUR_RECEIVING_EMAIL);
 
  if(!$mail->Send()) 
  {
    echo "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
  } 
  else 
  {
    echo "Message has been sent";
  }
} 
catch (phpmailerException $e) 
{
  $errors[] = $e->errorMessage();
}
catch (Exception $e) 
{
  $errors[] = $e->getMessage(); 
}

System Administration

How to save 55$ for undelete software

May 22, 2017 No Comments

You probably accidentally deleted some important files more then once. It is especially sensitive when it comes to photos from your family trip and when you deleting by instinct with SHIFT+Delete (avoiding Recycle Bin). I did that today and I needed some simple data recovery software. I remembered that there is File Scavenger who can restore accidentally deleted files and I installed it. Scanned the drive, found my photos and when I wanted to recover them I found out that I need to buy the licence for 55$. I didn’t like that so I decided to find free solution and found Recuva, free alternative for the same job. You don’t need commercial version and free version is just fine. It does the job perfectly!

eureka

System Administration

Mscorsvw.exe high CPU usage on Windows Server 2012

May 10, 2017 No Comments

I sometimes really hate Windows. When you do obligatory updates sometimes it takes hours for operating system to settle down and stop using CPU and memory like crazy.

One of these processes are mscorsvw.exe and ngen.exe which do some .NET assemblies optimization. I read about a lot of angry posts about these processes and that it takes hours “to optimize” and during these hours your server and services on it are suffering (and you need to be clever when finding explanations to your clients).

Follow these steps:

Navigate to the following location in Windows Explorer: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319
Run an elevated command prompt and change the current directory to the following directory
Type ngen.exe executequeueditems, and press ENTER
Wait until you receive the following message at the command prompt: All compilation targets are up to date.

This annoying processes stopped but now TiWorker.exe is taking his time and eating the CPU and Memory and it looks like it will take 3-4 hours. Yikes! I really hate Windows programmers for this hidden background CPU and Memory eaters.

System Administration

Can not connect to Remote Desktop Connection in Windows Server 2012R2

January 18, 2017 No Comments

I faced today strange problem that I could not connect to Windows server through Remote Desktop Connection. When I click “Connect” it disconnect me immediately. Restarting the server didn’t helped.

Here is the simple trick how you can connect…

Open RDC dialog and click on Show Options
Go to Advanced tab and choose under If server authentication fails option Connect and don’t warn me
You are now successfully connected after pressing the Connect button

Glad to hear if this saved you day. You can Tweet this solution so help someone else.

System Administration

How to free space on Disk C

February 20, 2016 No Comments

There are a lot of system stuff that just eat important space in Windows on disk C (if you have SSD and smaller C partition you don’t want to run out of space).

The best way is to create a junction (symbolic link) and to move some big folder to another partition (you need to have one first).

By doing this Windows will be fooled because you will get the same path but it will be shortcut (pointer) to another real location.

To do this move completely chosen folder to another partition and create symbolic link like this:

mklink /j c:\windows\MyMovedFolder d:\MyMovedStuff\MyMovedFolde

System Administration

Remove annoying Get Windows 10 tray icon

September 17, 2015 No Comments

Control Panel > Windows Update > Installed updates (at bottom left) -> find and remove KB3035583 (under Windows section) -> Restart computer
It can come again with next update so be careful and if you see it then right click on it (under Select the updates you want to install) and click Hide this update
As final check, see if you have a registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Gwx and delete it.

System Administration

Creating virtual host aliases under Apache

July 10, 2015 No Comments

Sometimes you want to create folder alias for your website like this: /images to be mapped to /home/your_account/public_html/images.

To do this, you need to edit Apache httpd.conf file which is located at /etc/httpd/conf

It is clever to put all aliases in one file in the same directory and name them aliases.conf and then only to reference this file from httpd.conf.

You will include aliases.conf in httpd.conf like this:

<IfModule mod_alias.c>
    Include /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/alias
</IfModule>

You define alias in aliases.conf file like this:

Alias /images /home/your_account/public_html/images
<Directory "/home/your_account/public_html/images">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI Includes
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

System Administration

Custom php.ini in specific CPanel account

July 9, 2015 No Comments

Copy original (default) CPanel php.ini file from location: /usr/local/lib/php.ini to your account folder: /home/account_username/path_to_php_ini/
Add the following code to the .htaccess file within your account’s public_html folder: suPHP_ConfigPath /home/account_username/path_to_php_ini/
Change this php.ini file to suits your needs and That’s all folks!

Note:
replace everywhere ‘/home/account_username/path_to_php_ini/‘ with the appropriate path to your custom php.ini file)