devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

This is just a quick entry on how to see which software is using which ports. This comes in handy when trying to install an application server, web server, etc, and are getting errors like “port is in use”.

Basically in any Unix type derivative such as Linux such (Ubuntu, RedHat, SuSe, etc.), as well as Mac OS X, all that you need to type this at the command line:
[code]
lsof -i
[/code]

I remember there being a couple of commands in Windows which you could do this with, but it’s been so long since I’ve used Windows on a regular basis I honestly don’t remember how to do it. I do know you can use TCPView to accomplish the same thing, however.

It seems like for at least a couple of years now, I’ve had problems when trying to login to newegg.com with Firefox. Across different installs of Firefox, on Windows, OS X, and Linux, etc.. no matter what I tried, Firefox just didn’t work at all. Today after my typical google search session, I did find a couple of solutions which took quite awhile to track down. If you’re having problems logging into to Newegg, give these a try:

Easy solution:

In the address bar of Firefox, type:

[code]
about:config
[/code]

Search or scroll down to the section called “network.http.sendRefererHeader” and change this value to 1.

For some reason, this was set to 2 on my machine.

Annoying solution:

Something is probably corrupt in your Firefox profile. Given that you’re the type of person who shops at newegg, AND uses firefox, you can probably figure out how to create a new profile on your own.

Anyhow, give those a try and see if they work. It’s nice to be able to shop on Newegg again with Firefox!

Oof. The site was offline for a good 30 hours or so. I attempted to add a Ruby On Rails install to FastCGI for a family related project I’ve been working on and my server totally exploded.. even the file system became unreadable. It reminded me a lot of a ‘buildworld’ upgrade gone awry on FreeBSD. I think the Debian VPS image was so out of date that it ate itself trying to process all of the updates. Since that happened I decided to move to a shiny new Futurehosting Ubuntu VPS which is bigger/better/faster (1 GB of RAM now, previously 512 MB) and I can already tell that this machine is much faster than the past.

After having to learn a lot of MySQL DBA magic to repair some very broken databases in my backup, get DNS, Apache, MySQL, and all of that other sort of junk setup again, the site is finally back up with no data loss much to my surprise.

I’ll be working on getting my other sites back online as well as upgrading/updating everything, and hardening this server a bit more, so if you see any blips over the next few days that’s why.