Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

Wake On Lan

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Needed the remote office guys to be able to switch on computers in the main office.  Found a good utility which allows sending the magic packets to networks on different subnet.

Download MC-WOL.exe from http://www.matcode.com/wol.htm
Example1:
MC-WOL 00:01:02:58:A3:C7

in case the machine is on a different subnet provide the subnet mask as below.

Example2:
MC-WOL 00:01:02:5C:A1:B2 /a 192.168.5.255

you can find the mac address of the machine by using the following in command prompt window
ipconfig  /all
Also Wake On Lan setting must be set to on in the system Bios.

Hidden Skype Emoticons

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Hidden emoticons on skype

skypehiddenemo

Wake On Lan Utility

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Was looking for a simple wake on lan utility that I could use to power on a particular machine.
WOL.exe from http://www.gammadyne.com/cmdline.htm#wol  is simple and straight forward and no installation required.
Just get the mac address of the target system network card and enable Wake On Lan via the Bios.
then run wol from commandline

WordPress Error: “Unable to create directory /wp-content/uploads/ Is its parent directory writable by the server?”

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Tried uploading images but kept getting this error
Unable to create directory …. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

Changed the Upload folder path in Settings->Miscellaneous to wp-content/uploads
That fixed it.

If that doesnt work, try changing the permissions on the uploads folder to 777

Fax to Email to folder in Linux

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Needed to move away from the single fax machine and find a better solution for receiving and processing faxes. Decided to move over to fax to email service and automating the extraction of fax images from the emails.
Tested on Centos, but should work on any Linux distro with a little tweaking.
You must have fetchmail and uudeview installed. use yum to install these.
*Recent updates of Centos warn you not to run fetchmail as root. You could either ignore this or run fetchmail as a non root user.

1. Signup for a faxtoemail service i.e www.efax.com and set the faxes to be forwarded to an email address eg fax@pratheesh.com as tif attachment.
2.
Create a local user on Centos to retrieve the emails. lets suppose the user created is ‘fax’
3.
Configure fetchmail to retrieve emails for this user
create file /root/.fetchmailrc with the following content
poll pratheesh.com protocol POP3 user fax password yourpassword is fax

4.
Change permission for the created file
chmod 0710 /root/.fetchmailrc
5.
create a script to fetch the emails and extract the attachment. create file /home/fax/retrievefax.sh with following content

FAXUSERFILE=/var/spool/mail/fax
FAXFOLDER=/home/fax/somefolder
#pop the mails from faxuser account frm mailserver
/usr/bin/fetchmail -a -v >> /var/log/fetchmail 2>&1
#run uudeview to strip attachment

/usr/bin/uudeview -i +a +o -q -p $TOSPLITFOLDER   $FAXUSERFILE
#clear the mailfile
cp /dev/null $FAXUSERFILE

6.
Save the file and make it executable
chmod ugo+x /home/fax/retrievefax.sh
7.
try sending a fax to your efax number and then run the script after a few minutes
sh /home/fax/retrievefax.sh

you can automate the execution by adding it as a cron job.

explanation of commands
in uudeview
-i suppresses interactivity
+a makes it append _1 instead of overwriting already existing file
+o stops overwriting
-q suppresses output messages ( so that cron does not send u mails)
-p to specify path where the decoded attachments should be sent
references:
http://home.arcor.de/karlheinz.langguth/linuxsmalloffice/mail.html
http://linuxgazette.net/issue58/nielsen2.html