ie don't print filename

I needed to convert a webpage into a pdf today, and using PDFCreator, this is normally a doddle.

However, whenever I did, it printed the address to the footer of the page.

After much faffing around, I found that under the page setup are "headers" and "footers". If you delete what is in those fields, it stop ie and firefox printing the filenames and page numbers.

XPath select attributes containing a string

I needed to find a way to use XPath to select items from within a html document, that would return back to me all UL tags that had an id that contained the word "menu".

To find all the UL's, it is simple enough to do:

//UL


However, to select the id of "menu", I then found:

//ul[@id='menu']


What I ended up with, to find any ULs that contained the word "menu" in the id attribute was:

//ul[contains(@id,'menu')]


Reset AutoIncrement Number in MySQL

To reset your autoincrement number, you can simply run the following SQL:

ALTER TABLE 'table_name' AUTO_INCREMENT = X

Where X is the ID number you want to set the increment start point to, so running

ALTER TABLE 'table_name' AUTO_INCREMENT = 0

resets the ID increment process, and

ALTER TABLE 'table_name' AUTO_INCREMENT = 1023

Would set the start seed to 1023 - sometimes useful for making things looked "used", for example with order systems.

Making changes to overall_header.php in phpBB do not take effect

I have been, for some time, trying to make changes to the code in the header file for phpBB. These were not changes for functionality, rather links required to other parts of the site.

Anyway, I had made the changes locally in my local copy of the overall_header.php file of the prosilver theme, but I ftp'd them up, the changes didn't happen.

Frustrated, I spent some time checking what phpBBs admin area said was in the file using the built in editor, and it said my changes were done.

However, what it doesn't say is that once you've made any changes to page files or style documents, you have to run the PURGE ALL feature from the admin control panel to flush out cached copies!

Ran that, and hey presto, fixed.

Person [user@example.com] on behalf of Another Person [user@otherexample.com]

Today I had a query whereby a user was sending emails after outlook had been reinstalled, and was getting this in the emails he was sending, even if it was from his normal account.

The problem seemed to be that the default email being sent from was incorrect, so setting the correct mailbox cured it.

PHP C# WCF Rijndael

I have been working with .NET and webservices for some time, but a colleague of mine has now moved over to using WCF instead of basic webservices.

After many, many problems dealing with simple soap message exchanges, we finally got our WCF service to talk to PHP (using NuSOAP) by setting the encoding to UTF8 and the binding to type basicHttpBinding.

My next problem was why when I was encoding data using Rijndael, was the encoded data returned from WCF not being decoded by mcrypt in PHP correctly.

Eventually, after some digging around, I found a really good article at http://benvanmol.blogspot.com/2009/10/secure-communication-between-net-and.html that summises the following points:

• You need to enable padding in the .net rijndael class. This ensures any blocks are padded with 0’s to fill them. This is done with Padding.Zeros
• Specifically set Cipher Block Chaining in the .Net class.
• The Initialisation Vector (IV) needs to be 16 bytes.
• You need to specifically set the encryption to the MD5 Hash algorithm, and change this to return the 32 character hash.
• Setup base64 encoding either end.

So, from this article by Ben van Mol I was able to produce a class from his code as follows:


public class PhpRijndael
{
System.Security.Cryptography.Rijndael r = null;

public void InitializePhpRijndael(string iv, string key,int blockSize)
{
byte[] keyBytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(EncodeTo64(key));
byte[] hash = MD5.Create().ComputeHash(keyBytes);
string ret = "";
foreach (byte a in hash)
{
ret += a.ToString("x2");
}
string iv64 = EncodeTo64(iv);
byte[] ivBytes = Convert.FromBase64String(iv64);

r = System.Security.Cryptography.Rijndael.Create();

r.Padding = PaddingMode.Zeros;
r.BlockSize = blockSize;
r.Key = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(ret);
r.IV = ivBytes;

}

public string Decrypt(string str)
{
byte[] encryptedBytes = Convert.FromBase64String(str);
byte[] decryptedBytes = transformBytes(
r.CreateDecryptor(), encryptedBytes);

string plaintext = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(decryptedBytes);
int idx = plaintext.IndexOf("\0");
if (idx > -1)
plaintext = plaintext.Substring(0, idx);

return plaintext;
}

public string Encrypt(string plaintext)
{
byte[] plainBytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(plaintext);
byte[] encryptedBytes = transformBytes(
r.CreateEncryptor(), plainBytes);

return Convert.ToBase64String(encryptedBytes);
}

private byte[] transformBytes(ICryptoTransform transform,
byte[] plainBytes)
{
MemoryStream memStream = new MemoryStream();
CryptoStream cryptStream =
new CryptoStream(memStream, transform,
CryptoStreamMode.Write);
cryptStream.Write(plainBytes, 0, plainBytes.Length);
cryptStream.Close();
byte[] encryptedBytes = memStream.ToArray();
memStream.Close();

return encryptedBytes;
}

private string EncodeTo64(string toEncode)
{
byte[] toEncodeAsBytes = System.Text.ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetBytes(toEncode);
string returnValue = System.Convert.ToBase64String(toEncodeAsBytes);

return returnValue;

}
}


In WCF I expose this in my endpoint as:

private string passPhrase = "secret";
private string initVector = "ujkrtadxcfrzpj1Bs5fpM18doZQDGYS4";
private int keySize = 256;

public string EncryptData(string value)
{

PhpRijndael r = new PhpRijndael();
r.InitializePhpRijndael(initVector, passPhrase, keySize);
string ret = "";
ret = r.Encrypt(value);
return ret;
}
public string ReturnTestData()
{
return EncryptData("Test Encrypted Data");
}

Note: Both of these are expose on the interface as OperationContracts inside the ServiceContract.

Now, in the PHP world, we need to create a page to call this, so inside a normal html form, we do the following:

if( isset($_POST['Submit']) )
{
//Show me all errors please
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', '1');
//load nusoap
require_once('../lib/nusoap.php');
//client config to CZ
$client = new nusoap_client('http://example/Service?wsdl',true);
$client->setEndpoint("http://example/Service/EndpointName");
$client->setUseCurl(0);
//set utf-8, or else it breaks.
$client->soap_defencoding='UTF-8';
$client->setDebugLevel( 1 );
//any errors?
$err = $client->getError();
if ($err) {
echo '

Constructor error

' . $err . '

';
echo '

Debug

' . htmlspecialchars($client->getDebug(), ENT_QUOTES) . '

';
exit();
}
// This is a paramter list that can be used later, but not used at the moment
$params = array(
'value' => "666"
);
//Call dummy method for some test info
$result = $client->call('ReturnTestData',$params);
//is there a fault?
if ($client->fault) {
echo '

Fault

'; print_r($result); echo '

';
} else {
$err = $client->getError();
if ($err) {
echo '

Error

' . $err . '

';
} else {
echo '

Result

'; print_r($result); echo '

';
}
}

//decode the base sixty four encoded data returned
$bsf = base64_decode(trim($result["ReturnTestDataResult"]));

//setup auth
$key = 'secret';
$iv='ujkrtadxcfrzpj1Bs5fpM18doZQDGYS4';

//a function to configure Rijndael from the afforementioned article
function init_rijndael ($key,$iv) {
$rj = mcrypt_module_open('rijndael-256', '', 'cbc', '');
if ($rj !== FALSE)
{
$expected_key_size = mcrypt_enc_get_key_size($rj);

$key = substr(md5(base64_encode($key)), 0, $expected_key_size);

mcrypt_generic_init($rj, $key, $iv);
}
return $rj;
}
//setup Rijndael
$rj = init_rijndael($key,$iv);

//decrypt result
$decryptedResult = mdecrypt_generic($rj, $bsf);
//print out.
echo '

Result

'; echo($decryptedResult); echo '

';
}


And hey presto - finally! a working php to WCF communication in Rijndael!

203.117.91.73 sdra64.exe

My eset firewall started complaining last night about connections going outbound to the IP address 203.117.91.73

After a call to ESET, I found out that that I had a trojan virus called sdra64.exe on my machine!

How do you get rid of it?

The guy from ESET firstly check for the virus using a program called RootAlyzer. This confirmed the infection. Next he downloaded procexp.exe from Microsoft to see what dependancies sdra64.exe had. Using another program called Process Unloader, he then closed the handles to sdra64.exe, and all files located in c:\windows\system32\lowsec. Once this was done, he created blank executable from notepad, and overwrote sdra64.exe, then deleted the lowsec folder.

Finally, in the registry under windowsnt\winlogon, he removed the reference to sdra64.exe in the userinit key.

A nasty little beast of a virus, and apparently acquired randomly from visiting a website!