Category Archives: Technical

Tales from the Helldesk

Not sure if this qualifies as urban legend or not:

A phone call was received from a customer wanting to know why they were unable to log in to the computer system – The nice old lady was asked if she could go to the server to check it and nice as pie she said “oh no, we’ve been flooded, it’s under 3ft of water”

From TheRegister

Internet Updates

Network Meeting
Network Meeting

Last week we had the opportunity to catch up with our fellow network operators. Amongst the interesting topics discussed were IP address depletion updates – suggestions that broadband providers might NAT their entire customer bases!

As most users have NAT on their broadband already, this effectively means double NAT – if you rely on a fixed IP address to the outside world, this has major consequences.

If you’re one of our broadband customers, we’d like to hear what you think. Let us know.

We also enjoyed a humourous talk on care of fibre optic cables. Unfortunately the detailed warnings on only using specialised cleaning equipment costing thousands of dollars was left a little deflated after a quick wipe on someone’s jeans gave excellent results!

From dirty to clean via trousers
From dirty to clean via trousers

Wiki time

MediaWiki Logo
MediaWiki Logo

A Wiki is a collaborative website that can be edited by multiple people, usually without having to log in. The encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis.  Ward Cunningham described a wiki as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.

We’ve recently started a documentation project here at 2020Media. We started out using WordPress, but we’re now trying out a Wiki. WordPress has some advantages like alerting the administrator when comments are made to articles, but the Wiki approach allows us to quickly add new pages and content in the shortest possible time.

As we’re already familiar with Wikipedia (it’s so well ranked on Google it must make the SEO ‘experts’ green with envy) we decided to use the same free software, MediaWiki.

If you’re thinking about a new website, take a look at wikis. 2020Media have hosting plans that are perfect for any wiki website.

How to reset Joomla and WordPress passwords

Joomla

Using any MySQL admin tool, (PHPMyAdmin), run the following query, entering your own choice of password:

UPDATE jos_users SET password = MD5("new-password") WHERE  jos_users.username = "admin"; 

If you’re using a different username to admin, change as appropriate.

If this doesn’t work, try changing jos_users to mos_users.

WordPress

If you know your username and the email account in your profile, you can use the “lost password” function –

If you can’t use this method, here’s how to do it in MySQL.

Using any MySQL admin tool, (PHPMyAdmin), run the following query, entering your own choice of password.

UPDATE wp_users SET user_pass = MD5("new-password") WHERE wp_users.user_login = "admin";

Notes: You must have access to your database. If you don’t, pass these instructions on to someone that does.